


Aka`aka Loko I Ka Ike A Ke Aloha

by fictionalisreal



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Healing, Heavy Angst, Hurt Danny "Danno" Williams, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kidnapping, M/M, Rape Recovery, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2018-11-14 08:16:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 27,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11204031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictionalisreal/pseuds/fictionalisreal
Summary: But when the owner pulls in not even ten minutes later, leads them to the back where they can watch the security footage, and they watch Danny get ripped from their lives almost fifteen hours after it really happens, Steve realizes something so life-altering in that moment he staggers from the weight of it:Danny Williams is the most essential thing in his life, and now that he’s gone, his world is crumbling.On day ninety, they find him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "Aka`aka Loko I Ka Ike A Ke Aloha" (Hawaiian) - the secrets within me are seen through love.

\--

Something was wrong, he could feel it.

\--

Steve glanced at his watch for the fifth time in what felt like thirty minutes, but was actually only two. Danny was supposed to have been here by now, it was ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

He hadn’t seen Danny since they all left HQ last night around seven. Trying to get a handle on these missing persons cases, they’d been bent over the computer table all day until they looked up at the clock and realized it was past dinnertime and they scrammed. And since he’d been having meetings with the Governor before heading to HQ in the morning, Danny had been driving himself in.

After getting in and getting distracted by phone messages and unanswered emails, Steve hadn’t noticed Danny’s office was empty until it was close to ten o’clock.

Later, when he realizes how much time was wasted, the guilt would set in and his heart would crumple from the weight of knowing he might have been able to prevent it all from happening.

\--

Pushing his chair back from his desk, he walks over to Lou’s office. He opens the door, tapping on the doorframe to get his attention. “You seen Danny?”

Lou looks up from the missing persons’ reports he seems to be reading again. “No, I haven’t.” He looks down at his watch, frowning at the time. “It’s ten am, he’s usually here by now, isn’t he?”

Steve nods, chewing on his lip, before heading into the bullpen where Kono and Chin are going through the case files for the hundredth time.

“You guys seen Danny?” he asks them, his hands on his hips.

They glance at each other for a moment, as if just realizing that Danny hadn’t shown up yet.

“No, actually, we haven’t.” Kono’s brow furrows in concern.

“Did he have an appointment this morning?” asks Chin.

“He didn’t tell me he did. I thought the same thing too, but he’d have texted or called if he was running that late. But he’s not answering, I’ve tried his cell like ten times.”

Scrubbing a hand across his face, Steve forces himself to take a deep breath. It could be nothing – his phone could be dead and he overslept, his car died and he’s at the shop getting it fixed and forgot to call, he turned his phone off as he went to the dentist. It could be nothing, there was no reason to panic.

Yet.

\--

“I tracked his phone and it says it’s at his apartment,” reports Chin as Steve enters the bullpen again.

“I called Rachel and she said she hasn’t talked to Danny since the day before yesterday, and that as far as she knew, he didn’t have any appointments scheduled for this morning.”

Chin frowns, but before he can say anything Steve’s phone rings.

“Boss, he’s not here at the apartment. His phone was on the kitchen table, but the Camaro isn’t in the driveway.”

Chin’s already tracking the car’s GPS before Steve can even voice the command.

He straightens up, confusion on his face. “It says he’s at the supermarket on Kaiulani Street. That’s an odd time to go grocery shopping.”

\--

Steve tries to stop the tremor in his hand by clenching and unclenching, but he can feel it moving throughout his whole body, so he’s not sure of how good a job he’s doing.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this, Chin.”

His voice doesn’t sound like his own because once he’s said what’s been running through his mind since that morning, his world feels like it’s starting to close in on itself.

“I’m sure everything’s fine.”

But it sounds hollow and Steve can see the way Chin’s lip thins and his shoulders are tense.

\--

When they get to the supermarket, Steve’s world officially feels like it’s tilting. The Camaro is in the parking lot and there’s a broken bag of groceries underneath an open driver’s side door.

It’s the first sign of what Steve’s been afraid of this entire time and he’s seeing spots.

\--

Chin comes over. “They’re closed on Tuesdays, but I got the owner on the phone and they’re headed up here now so we can take a look at the security footage.”

He’s putting up a valiant effort in not showing the stress and concern on his face, but Steve can see it plain as day.

\--

But when the owner pulls in not even ten minutes later, leads them to the back where they can watch the security footage, and they watch Danny get ripped from their lives almost fifteen hours after it really happens, Steve realizes something so life-altering in that moment he staggers from the weight of it:

Danny Williams is the most essential thing in his life, and now that he’s gone, his world is crumbling.

\--

The lights from the police cruisers are blending with the tears that refuse to fall. His chest is hurting so much he feels like he can’t breathe. His hands won’t stop shaking long enough to do anything. He’s thrown up three times since the first time they watched Danny’s kidnapping on the security tape and his world collapsed.

\--

Duke and HPD show up at some point and CSU starts sweeping the scene. Steve vaguely remembers calling the Governor and telling him.

Honestly, Steve doesn’t remember much of anything past the look in Danny’s eye on the security tape when he realized what was happening and the sinking hole of despair that began to suck the blood from his veins. He can’t stop watching the tape, he’s seen it at least twenty times – angrily and forcefully hitting the rewind button in hopes that if he watches it enough times, maybe it didn’t happen.

When he’s rewinding it for the twenty-seventh time, Eric’s hands are prying his fingers off the tablet and Steve has to close his eyes because he can’t look into his eyes right now, he can’t see what he knows will be there, he just _can’t_.

“Please,” he begs Steve in a broken voice. “Please tell me it isn’t true, _please _.”__

____

Steve squeezes Eric’s fingers almost painfully, and he bows his neck back and towards the sky in agony.

____

\--

____

This is the moment.

____

Once he admits it, there’s no going back. There’s no denying it any longer. There’s no longer any hope that this isn’t all one terrible, horrific nightmare and he’ll wake up any minute now and Danny will be sitting next to him on the lanai.

____

This is it.

____

\--

____

When he opens his eyes again and sees Eric’s tear-streaked ones, something in him snaps and the floodgates open. “I can’t, I can’t. Oh God, he’s gone, he’s really gone…”

____

He’s sobbing and he thinks Eric is too because he can feel a wetness on his left shoulder, but everything is fading into white noise and all he can do is wait until the torrential floods flow out of him and leave a wake deep down into the very depths of his soul.

____

Danny’s gone.

____

\--

____

Steve grips his phone tightly in his hand for the first two days, waiting for it to ring. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t eat. Images of Danny in the security tape flash across his eyes, and he has to leave his house the first time he goes home because every inch of it reminds him of Danny and he’s already punched three holes in the wall.

____

They put it together on day four.

____

By day six, Steve’s resigned himself to believe there’s no ransom call coming.

____

Rachel drops Gracie off the night of the seventh day because they’re both not sleeping. Steve falls asleep with her in his arms, in Danny’s chair out on the lanai, after repeatedly calling Danny’s phone so they can listen to his voice on his voicemail. She stays with him three nights a week after that.

____

Danny’s family arrives from New Jersey on day nine and his mom holds him while he cries for a good ten minutes in the airport parking lot. Steve gets drunk with his sisters that night and they tell Danny stories until three in the morning. Steve can’t stop telling Danny’s dad "I’m sorry" and "It’s all my fault" until he gets socked in the face, and then he’s handed an ice pack for his cheek and the two of them reminisce about all of the things Danny hated about Hawaii.

____

On day fourteen, the hotline for Danny and the other missing persons officially stops ringing. Steve holds Kono’s hair back as she vomits her lunch.

____

On day seventeen, Steve drags Eric home with him and they sit and listen to the ocean and remember how much Danny complained about the sound.

____

On day twenty-one, they catch a lead that dries up three days later. Chin punches a wall and Lou cleans up his knuckles.

____

Mary visits on day twenty-five and stays for five days. The first day, she holds Steve in Danny’s bed at his apartment, for hours, as he sobs himself into exhaustion. The third day, she and the team fall asleep piled on the couch in Steve’s office staring at the wall and passing around a bottle of scotch. By the fifth day, Steve’s feeling a little better until he looks at the calendar and realizes Danny will have been gone a month come morning.

____

It’s the one-month anniversary and they all sit in the middle of HQ and watch home-made videos they compiled of Danny: Grace in between Steve and Eric, Kono in Adam’s lap, Malia on Chin’s chest, Renee alongside Lou. They leave the lights off so they can pretend no one hears the other crying.

____

On day thirty-two, the Governor holds a press conference expressing his support in permitting Five-O to remain on the missing persons’ case and informing the public that other cases will be rerouted to HPD, NCIS, BAU, the BAU’s IRT, and MacGyver’s DXS, as needed. The team leaders for each team call Steve to confirm and he manages to keep it together for two of the five calls.

____

The morning of day thirty-four they find the first body, and Steve stares at the fourteen-year-old boy’s pale skin while Lou throws up in the bushes.

____

Sam and Callen fly in to help HPD with a case about a dead intelligence officer in Waimanalo on day thirty-six. Every night, Sam takes Steve and Kono sparring until their anger has left their hands trembling, and Callen takes Chin and Lou to the gun range to shoot until there are bruises on their trigger fingers.

____

Day forty-three is Christmas Day and Rachel shoves Steve, Grace, and Eric on a plane headed for New Jersey two days before. They hold each other the whole flight, too tired to talk and too depressed to cry. They all bunk together at Danny’s parents’ house, because they can calm each other best when the nightmares hit, and are never more than three feet away from each other. No one judges them for crying whenever they eventually do.

____

Steve breaks down and sobs in the Governor’s office the afternoon of day forty-six, and the Governor cancels his afternoon meetings to build Steve’s resolve back up.

____

On day fifty-two, Catherine helps them pin down a far-fetched lead but it falls through eight hours later.

____

Steve throws in his last favor in the Navy on day fifty-seven and cries himself hoarse in Gracie’s hair that night.

____

For the two-month anniversary, they listen to Bon Jovi and eat malasadas, while watching reruns of CHIPS on the floor of HQ, and pretend the last two months are all a bad dream.

____

Danny’s parents fly in again on day sixty-four. They stay with Steve, and along with Eric and the team, help clear out Danny’s stuff from his apartment and into Steve’s house because his lease is up and he’s not there to pay rent. It takes them the whole weekend, and then they get drunk on cheap alcohol and watch the home videos that Danny’s parents brought with them.

____

On day seventy-one, Joe helps them pin down a lead that takes them to their second body, a seventeen-year-old girl.

____

Jack and MacGyver’s team flies in on day seventy-eight to help HPD with a case about a missing dermatologist. They show up at the Palace every night they’re there with dinner and don’t try to fill the silence that’s made a home in the Five-O offices.

____

Sang Min pays them a visit on day eighty-five with a broken hand and a solid lead.

____

On day ninety, they find him.

____

\--

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

\--

They flash unbidden and merciless.

The swirl of the water mingles with the blood and Steve wills its hypnotism to melt away every memory, every scene, every image threatening to rip apart his life piece by piece.

\--

_Steve hesitates at the door, hand just above the doorknob. He knows he needs to hurry, but if he finds what he’s afraid he’s going to find on the other side of that door, he doesn’t know if there will be anything left of him that will survive._

_He needs to find Danny alive, there isn’t any other alternative. ___

____

_____ _

____

_He opens the door and prays more than he ever has in his entire life._

____

_____ _

____

\--

____

_____ _

____

Steve grips the ceramic sink tighter, the strain of his muscles fighting through the haze of everything that just happened. The images are replaying over and over again in front of his eyes and he can’t stop their relentless pursuit.

____

_____ _

____

His soul aches more and more with the weight of each one.

____

_____ _

____

\--

____

_____ _

____

_It smells wretched, his gag reflex already working up his throat. It’s the first thing he notices._

____

_____ _

____

_The second is the horribly tainted walls. There’s stains of all different shades, things he really doesn’t want to know about yet are already creating scenes in his mind. ___

____

_______ _ _ _

____

_The third is the damp floor, he can hear a faint tapping of water somewhere but echoing everywhere. ___

____

_________ _ _ _ _ _

____

_But it’s the fourth thing that catches his attention and halts his entire existence: a body. It’s skin and bones, filthy, blood puddles flowing underneath, chained to the floor, and still. ___

____

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_Too still. ___

____

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_And he’s ninety-nine percent sure it’s Danny. ___

____

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

____

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

He’s on the other side of the small bathroom, fingers gripping his hair tight enough to hurt but he can’t seem to stop because it’s the only thing pinning him to the here and now and not the nightmare playing behind his eyelids.

____

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

The smell is still in his lungs, the sound of the chains blocking everything out, the filth crawling under his skin, the flickering lights burning his eyes with their implications.

____

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

____

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_“They took him away.”_

____

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_“Please.” ___

____

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_“You have to help him.” ___

____

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

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___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

He can’t breathe, there’s not enough oxygen for his lungs. And he wants to laugh or punch something or shatter into a million pieces because _he's _the one struggling to breathe now, when he hasn’t been the one chained to a wall and tortured for the last -__

____

_____________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

____

____

_“Danno, you can’t leave me. You can’t. I need you, okay? Please don’t go, I can’t do this without you.” His voice cracks and he can’t see past the blurriness in his eyes._

____

_____________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_“I…love you, I’m s-s-sorry…” The words are barely a puff of air before Danny's eyes flutter closed for the final time. ___

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_______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

_It takes his entire team to peel him away from Danny so the newly-arrived paramedics can tend to him, but that doesn’t stop his screams when they have to revive him. ___

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\--

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_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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His vision is spinning, black creeping on the edges of his eyes.

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He can faintly here the bathroom door opening and voices spilling in but it’s muddled and everything sounds like he’s underwater.

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_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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He’s fading, and he wishes it would hurry.

____

_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

____

_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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_“He said you would come. He said you would find us.” ___

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___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

____

___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

When the darkness finally overwhelms him, he welcomes it.

____

___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

Because, on the other side, he knows that he’ll get to see Danny sitting with him on the lanai again, smiling at him with those bright, cerulean eyes and joy-filled crinkles that curl his lips upwards without his control.

____

___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

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___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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He’s right and, _oh _, is it beautiful.__

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____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

\--

____

____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

When he comes to again, he’s lying in one of the beds.

____

____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

He’s relieved to notice he’s not hooked up to any machines, but still. The idea of him there while Danny’s…just. It’s more than he can deal with right now.

____

____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

It takes him a few seconds to regain his bearings, but once he does, the low light of the room settles around the people interspersed around him, and he slowly takes it all in: Adam rubbing Kono’s back soothingly; Malia gripping Chin’s hand tighter than Steve’s ever seen before; Renee resting her hands on Lou’s shoulders while he holds his head in his hands; Eric staring at his phone as he absently twists it in circles on the side of Steve’s bed; a sleeping, tear-streaked Gracie curled up in a ball by his legs; Rachel worriedly staring out the window at the dark sky with her dark circles and nail-bitten fingers; Kamekona distractedly fiddling with one of the boxes of take-out shrimp in the room; Max and Jerry doing their best not to fall victim to the strain of the last three months and peak of today’s events.

____

____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

The tears fall down his cheeks before he can stop them and he doesn’t even bother wiping them away. He’s not sure what it says about him that it took the last three months for him to not care about crying in front of the people he calls family, _o’hana _.__

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

But he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care about anything at this point he’s so eternally exhausted.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

He shifts himself, sitting up higher in the bed and it seems to catch the attention of the others. Gracie stirs, seeking Steve’s warmth and presence unconsciously; he grabs for her and hugs her close to his chest and she settles again.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

“Hey,” says Eric, voice hoarse and eyes heavy.

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

Steve rubs his eyes with the palm of his hand. “What happened?”

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

“You passed out in the bathroom.”

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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Steve nods, unsurprised.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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“Nurses said we could stay in here with you while we waited,” murmurs Kono, a bone-deep exhaustion lacing her words, obvious to Steve even with his eyes closed.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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____

“Anything?” he asks hopefully, opening his eyes to glance at everyone. He already knows the answer, but he hopes that maybe, just maybe, there’s a light at the end of this horrific tunnel.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

A curt shake of the head by Chin, downcast eyes by Lou, a sad smile by Adam, a lip tightening by Rachel – Steve gets the idea.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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Nothing yet.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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They pass the next three hours like that.

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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____

By all appearances, the room is silent except for the occasional shift in movement, sniffle of past and current tears, or softly murmured words of conversation. But Steve knows the room is loud enough with all the things that aren’t being said: thoughts, replayed memories, what-if’s.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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It’s deafening.

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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____

He stares at the clock, watching it tick and letting its rhythm steady his ever-aching existence, for a solid hour.

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____

He listens to the air conditioning system wheeze softly and the quiet idling of the hospital night shift outside the door for another forty-five in hopes that it’ll lull him into a dreamless sleep. 

It doesn’t.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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____

For another thirty, he gazes at the rising sun outside the window, the dawn waves of color spilling onto the sky as if the world isn’t about to end at any moment.

____

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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He prays that it’s right.

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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A man in wrinkled, blue scrubs with glasses and exhaustion-riddled eyes finds them five hours after they first arrived at the hospital and Steve is shaking.

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

It feels like an eternity or two passes when the man looks at each one of them, eyes not giving away anything, and Steve is encroaching on hyperventilating before the man finally does speak and he loses all sense of reality:

____

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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“He’s alive and he's stable.”

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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\--

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

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“His heart stopped three times.”

The doctor’s worn voice penetrates the emotionally charged air and Steve feels it like a shot to the heart. “Once with the paramedics, twice on the table. I thought for sure we were going to lose him.”

Steve starkly finds it’s hard to breathe again, and after a few slippery breaths, his blood eventually stops rushing in his ears long enough for him to hear that the doctor is still talking.

“…’ve never seen anything like it. Thirty percent of his body is covered in scar tissue, second-degree burns covering his whole right side from his shoulder down to his knee, severe ligature marks on his wrists and ankles from the restraints. He needed a total of forty-seven stitches for all his lacerations, there’s a hefty one above his right eye that needed twelve just by itself. He is severely malnourished and dehydrated, the atrophy in his muscles has deteriorated most of his body mass – he weighed in at ninety pounds. Evidence of waterboarding, suffocation, choking – his throat, alone, has had such extensive damage done to it that we aren’t sure he’ll ever be able to talk again. There’s a nine-inch-long gash on his left leg that’s badly infected. The next forty-eight hours are critical, if we don’t see any improvement from the antibiotics we have him on, and soon, then we’ll have to resort to other measures.”

“What kind of measures are we talking here?” Steve asks, and his voice is barely above a whisper but it shatters the quiet that seemed to blanket everyone as they listened to the doctor rattle off every evil thing that was inflicted on Danny.

The doctor makes eye contact with each person, and then locks his eyes on to Steve’s, remorseful sincerity flowing out of him like water. “Amputation.”

Steve’s head hangs in his hands, and distantly he can hear Kono’s strangled cry; Eric braces his head on Steve’s shoulder, and Chin and Lou suddenly look ten years older.

“What are his chances?” Chin’s voice is soft and exhausted, but logical and Steve is thankful because he can’t seem to think past the numbing haze in his mind.

“Because the wound went untreated for as long as it did, I’m afraid that it doesn’t look very good. We’ve started him on an antibiotic protocol, but I don’t know if they will be able to flush out the infection in time before the gangrene sets in and we’ll be forced to stop it from entering the blood flow. His extreme malnutrition and muscular atrophy don’t help either, and his immune system has taken such severe blows with his injuries, that his body simply doesn’t have the strength to fight.”

Steve squeezes his eyes shut tightly to hold in the hot tears, wishing, for what legitimately could be the ten-thousandth time, that he could go back to that dreadful day and change it. Stop it from happening, even switch places with him, _anything _.__

__And it hurts more than he can bear that he _can’t_. _ _ ______

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____“Like I said, the next forty-eight hours are critical. He’s a fighter, nobody would have lasted as long as he did and made it out alive, if they weren’t.” The doctor reassures the group with a small, hopeful smile._ _ _ _

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____After a few silent moments, the doctor speaks again, his reluctance making his voice heavy and sending a chill down Steve’s spine._ _ _ _

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____“I’m afraid there’s something else…” he starts, face pinched because, really, how much did this man have to go through?_ _ _ _

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____Steve’s almost afraid to ask, but he _has _to know, he has to know everything so he can help Danny through this, help Danny heal.___ _ _ _

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______“What is it?” It’s more of a breathless croak than anything, but it echoes in the suspended air like an obnoxious balloon._ _ _ _ _ _

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______He grows solemn, and Steve knows, he _knows _before he even says anything, that his next words will haunt his dreams during the many long nights to come.___ _ _ _ _ _

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________“There was also evidence of extensive sexual assault.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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________When Steve’s mom died, he remembers laying on top of his bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to his dad’s sobs echo across the hallway night after night. He thought then that his heart would break from the emotion he was experiencing, that life couldn’t possibly get any lower than it already was. But then Freddie died, and Steve was _forced _to let him die, and he thought he would explode from the concave of it all that night in the barracks. Then his dad died, and he felt it all over again but with more confusion and guilt mixed in to the folds of his beaten and bruised heart. But right now, he knows, without a doubt, that this is the worst day of his entire life. Those moments he thought were the lowest in no way compare to the tidal wave flooding through his veins, his lungs, his heart: the guilt, the sadness, the grief, the fury, the rage. It's consuming him from the inside out and he has no idea how he’s going to survive it this time around.___ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________When there’s an oxygen mask put over his mouth and nose, Steve abruptly realizes that the full-blown meltdown wasn’t happening just inside of his head._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________“Breathe in: one, two, three, four. Breathe out: one, two, three, four...” It’s Danny’s doctor that’s swimming in front of his blurry vision and saying the soothing words, and Steve wants to tell him to stop focusing on him and to go help Dan—_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________“By me helping you, I’m helping Danny. He needs you to help him fight right now and giving into what you’re feeling isn’t going to do that.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________Either the doctor is a mind reader or Steve said those words out loud, he goes for the latter and, eventually, he gets his breathing to calm down again and the roar in his ears disseminates._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________“You okay, Boss?” asks a very concerned Kono, standing by a hovering Lou, Chin, and Eric. And Steve is suddenly very grateful that everyone else decided to leave so they could discuss details with the doctor._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________“Yeah,” Steve clears his throat, his voice scratchy. “I’m fine.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________The oxygen mask is removed and the doctor finishes explaining his preliminary tests on Danny. Steve doesn’t hear much besides “rape kit” and “evidence” and “STD testing,” because if he did, he would start panicking again. And like the doctor said, that isn’t going to help Danny right now. He needs to pull it together, he needs to reign it all in, temper the storm._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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___________For Danny_ , Steve thinks to himself as he fights the waves. _Do it for Danny._ __________

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______________\--_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________They’re all outside his room, the windowpane, the only thing physically separating them from Danny, and what doesn’t feel like a hundred different lifetimes for the first time in months._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________Their eyes haven’t left Danny who’s been unconscious since he was brought in. All they can do is stare at him, praying to any deity that can hear that this isn’t all just one big dream._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________Steve crumples into a nearby chair, the relief at seeing a living, breathing Danny Williams, after everything, knocking him off his feet._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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______________He looks _awful _– there’s more purple than Steve can see skin, he’s lost count how many tubes and wires are connected to him, he looks like he’s lost half his body weight – Steve’s certain he can fit his whole hand around his wrist _twice _– and he’s pretty sure there’s a permanent layer of grime coating his skin, no matter how many times the nurses scrub him clean._____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________Steve’s never seen something so beautiful in his life._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________He doesn’t even know he’s crying until Kono’s wiping at his tears and Eric’s hand grabs his, and he's brought back to the present._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________He makes a garbled noise that would have been a chuckle in another lifetime, and wipes the snot from the underside of his nose with a tissue that Chin passes him. “You’d think I’d be out of tears by now.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________The others are oddly silent beside him, and he glances over at them after a few seconds to see them beaming at him with teary-eyed expressions._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________“What?” he asks, self-consciously._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________“That’s the first time you’ve smiled since Danny disappeared,” Chin’s voice is actually a little wobbly once he gets the words out._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________They all just kind of bask in the moment, unable to tear their eyes away from the man they haven’t stopped thinking about for the last three months. No one speaks for a long time, each of them trying to burn the image of a living, breathing, close-in-proximity Danny Williams into their retinas._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________But it’s Steve who breaks the silence some time later. He wasn’t even planning on saying anything but the words just kind of flow out of him with the breath he releases and he realizes, after they’ve left his mouth, that he doesn’t really regret them:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________“It took three months without him to realize I was in love with him.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________His eyes don’t leave Danny’s form, but he knows the others can see the love that’s filling his eyes and shining from deep within his soul. Kono buries her face in his shoulder, sniffling; Eric just holds his hand tighter and lets the tears continue to fall; Chin grips his shoulder and doesn’t let go._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________A few almost awkward, silent seconds later, Lou speaks up. “Well, it’s about damn time.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________Steve doesn’t remember the last time he and the others laughed, and he especially doesn’t remember laughing for as long as they do; but afterwards, he feels lighter than the wind. For the first time in three months, he can breathe without feeling like a giant weight is pressing down on his chest, on his soul, on his life._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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__________________He looks over at Danny, sees his chest fall and rise rhythmically, and thinks that maybe, just maybe, everything might be okay._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all.
> 
> I have over 60 pages worth of Word dedicated to this story, minus a few transition scenes here and there. And then I sit down to figure out what I'm gonna use for the next chapter, and create 1000-2000 words of word vomit and decide I like that much better. Every. Time. Lord, help me.
> 
> Hope you enjoy ;)

\--

The next thirty-six hours pass in suspended animation.

Steve spends about half of those thirty-six hours watching the clock near Danny’s hospital room door. He becomes very aware of how long a second, a minute, an hour lasts. He’s decided that time seems to be this fluid, abstract thing, rather than a concrete, reliable constant; because one moment, it’s moving slower than a thermostat on a hot, sunny day, and the next, it’s moving as fast as a hummingbird in the evening breeze. The faster moments are rarer, but they still do happen; and usually only when Steve manages to force himself to use the bathroom when his bladder threatens to explode, or grab food from the cafeteria because his stomach can’t hold in its desperation any longer, and especially when Eric dragged him home for a shower that one time. But the moments that really drive Steve stir-crazy are when the clock seems to just stop time, and the seconds he uses to will the clock hand to move again aren’t counted into the folds of the universe.

And unfortunately, those moments happen more often than he would like.

The other half of his time, he spends gazing at Danny’s unconscious form. He honestly can’t help himself, it’s as if there’s this force that draws him in and he can’t keep from subjecting himself to Danny’s gravitational pull. Granted, he might not be trying very hard – after the horrendous experience of the last three months, he could stare at an unconscious Danny Williams all day long and be fully satisfied.

And he is, _oh_ , he is.

He watches the way Danny’s chest rises and falls, methodically, for a full hour, hoping its hypnotic rhythm will lull him into light sleep to pass the time.

He isn’t surprised that it doesn’t; it’s honestly too beautiful to miss.

The crinkles in his forehead and temples ever-slowly mold and realign themselves and it captivates him for a good thirty minutes every time his eyes get stuck on them. Then, Steve can lose himself, for a while, in wishful fantasies of imagining what those crinkles would smell, taste, and feel like.

Sometimes, if he’s really patient, he’ll be rewarded with a faint muscle twitch from either a hand or toe, and he can never manage to stop himself from jumping to his feet in blatant hopeful excitement.

In the moments when he finally does succeed in forgetting his three months’ worth of worry and his current stress about the infection, a nurse or doctor will come by in full-fledged protective gear and check on Danny’s progress (in order to avoid worsening the infection, only nurses or doctors are allowed in his room, and they must wear a mask, gloves, and new scrubs to enter). Then it hits him like a tidal wave, his skin tingles with the weight of it and his thoughts are sent into a frantic tailspin.

When they’re coming up on hour thirty-seven, things change.

Danny’s doctor – Dr. Lawson is his name, Steve knows, because he decided to actually remember his and the nurses' names since he knew he’d be spending a lot of his time there anyway – approaches Steve with an extra set of protective gear and a questioning eyebrow.

Steve freezes, nerves set ablaze with the possibility of getting to be close to Danny but also unwilling to worsen the already precarious situation. But with a confident nod from Dr. Lawson and a supportive shove in Danny’s direction from Eric, Steve soon finds himself changing out of his jeans and into a dark blue pair of scrubs.

By the time they’re heading into Danny’s room, Steve’s hands are red and raw from scrubbing them clean so many times and his breath is shaky underneath his mask. One last look at his team behind him, and seeing only encouraging smiles, Steve steps into the room after Dr. Lawson.

Steve feels the air shift immediately: no tinkering hospital noises, the consistent beeping of his heart monitor and the wheezing of his breathing machine are the only noises; the temperature of the room is just right, no hot, Hawaiian air seeping in from the outside like in the hallway; and no window to look through in order to see the man he’s so irrevocably fallen for, he’s close enough to touch him with his gloved hand.

The closer they walk towards Danny’s bed, the sharper Steve’s emotions become because Danny is _here_ and Danny is _alive_ and it’s hitting Steve all over again.

His face must show more than he’s aware of because Dr. Lawson catches on.

“It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it?”

Steve’s head whips around at the onslaught of noise in the previously quiet room to see the doctor mercifully watching Danny steadily breathe and not Steve’s open display of emotion. He attempts to pull himself together – clearing his throat, adjusting his scrub top, standing up straighter – before responding.

“Yeah,” his voice is rough, but thankfully neither of them mentions it. “Yeah, it is.”

The doctor’s head cocks to the side, pensive. “We don’t get a lot of these kinds of cases. When we do, we’re always too late and their bodies give out from all the evil inflicted on them.”

He pauses, as if specifically remembering each case, each person, each story.

“It’s nice being able to witness this one. They may not all be the same, but you can tell from their injuries how bad it must have been, and this one ranks pretty high up there. And to be able to witness the recovery, the all-encompassing depth of healing they must endure, the build-up of the person that was stripped from them – it changes you, in an unforeseeable way. And I know I’m not the only person here who is grateful to be witness to such a sight.”

The man’s words flow over Steve like cleansing water, washing away the grime and grit that stuck to him after months of waiting, wishing, hoping. He breathes in the clean oxygen air and feels his lungs purify themselves down to the very bottom of his ribcage.

When they eventually do leave Danny’s room, Steve feels the rejuvenation in his body like a swan dive into the blue, Hawaiian saltwater he loves oh-so much.

 _Everything is going to be okay_ , he thinks to himself, as he latches onto that thread of hope like a lifeline and continues his perch of watching Danny.

\--

The sudden burst of hope lasts for four hours before the feeling of getting doused with a bucket of ice cold water hits and Steve’s concern skyrockets again.

Danny’s machines start blaring and blinking colors that do funny things to Steve’s stomach. The nurses are rushing in, Dr. Lawson is being paged on the intercom, and Steve barely even notices Eric and Kono latching onto his arm as he lurches to his feet.

The frenzied movements of the medical professionals in Danny’s room do nothing to ease the panic at the bottom of Steve’s spine. Steve watches them like a hawk, his heart in his throat and his thoughts whiting out.

Then Dr. Lawson comes out, the lines in his forehead are furrowed but his eyes are filled with determination and a hint of remorse.

Steve balks.

“Steve,” he starts, taking off his mask. “I understand you’re Danny’s medical power of attorney.”

His eyes widen instinctively, his hand is shaking even with the death grip Eric is currently applying. “Yes.”

“I’m afraid the antibiotics didn’t flush out the infection in time, and gangrene has set in. We need to amputate, and we need to act fast if we are going to save everything above the knee.”

Steve stares at him, unsure if he heard the words he thought he did.

The doctor’s eyes soften just a little before he speaks again. “I need your permission to amputate, Steve.”

He _did_ hear right, but everything is spinning and he isn’t sure what’s up from down.

The doctor grips his biceps firmly, catching his attention from the swirling of the room. “Steve. Danny is going to be okay, _if_ we amputate. I need you to tell me it’s okay, I need to hear those words come out of your mouth before I can help Danny. And I _will_ help him.”

Steve closes his eyes, hoping to God that he’s doing the right thing and trusting the right person, before opening them again.

“It’s okay.”

The words feel like cotton in his mouth but they must make sense because the doctor is squeezing him again and the determination is alight in his eyes. “He’s gonna be okay, trust me.”

Steve vaguely nods, watching as Dr. Lawson sprints off, undoubtedly to the OR, and the nurses are soon wheeling Danny’s bed out of his room after the doctor.

But first, they stop in front of Steve in the hallway, Danny’s unconscious form three inches from him for the second time that day.

“You can say something to him really quick, if you want. He needs all the encouragement he can get.”

Steve forces himself to lean closer to Danny’s ear, the pumping of air from his handheld breathing apparatus the nurse, Vanessa, is using loud enough to cover his whispering plea and the loud thumping of his aching heart.

“Come back to me, Danno, _please_.”

Then before he knows it, they’re whisking him off to the OR and he’s being caught by more than one pair of hands as the fear spreads throughout his body.

 _Everything will be okay because Danny will be okay_ , Steve thinks to himself as he prepares himself for the next, long and arduous wait. _He will, he will._

\--

The surgery lasts five hours.

Five _long_ hours in which Steve is certain he’s losing his mind.

Kamekona brings everyone – because Eric and the team refuse to leave his side for a second – shrimp on the house because “ _haole_ is _o’hana_ ”; Eric calls the necessary people – Rachel, Danny’s parents, Mary, the Governor – because Steve isn’t in the right state of mind to do so and updates them about what’s happening; Rachel drops by with Grace to reassure Steve through words and Gracie time that he did the right thing, and Gracie hugs his neck for a long time and tells him _again_ how much she appreciates him taking care of “her Danno.”

He knows exactly how many steps it takes to reach the bathroom, the cafeteria, and the front door from the doorway of Danny’s hospital room.

He discovers he can only clench and unclench his hands so many times before his hand muscles spaz out on him.

None of the nurses even bother telling him to move out of their way anymore; they just go around him.

He thinks he wore a dip in the hallway floor in front of Danny’s room from his pacing.

Dr. Lawson comes back with a tired yet satisfied smile exactly five hours and two minutes after running off to the OR.

“He’s okay. Unconscious, stable, and infection-free.”

And Steve collapses into his designated chair, the relief making his legs feel too much like noodles and not the appendages helping him stand, and focuses on dragging in one shuddering breath at a time.

\--

Twenty minutes later, when Nurse Vanessa wheels Danny back into his room and Steve gets his first real look at him through the window, he starts to believe him.

It’s hard not to when the paleness of his skin has somewhat faded and the once-constant layer of sweat has diminished completely. He doesn’t look like he’s fighting an infection anymore.

Steve looks at the bandaged spot where there was once half a leg but now ends equal to his other knee and dares to consider it a win.

Everything can still be okay, even with one less of a leg.

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	5. Chapter 5

\--

Steve is just starting to doubt that it’ll ever happen when, six days after they find him, Danny’s eyes _finally_ open.

Prior to that glorious day though, there were several other things that happened immediately following Danny’s amputation surgery that made Steve feel like the world was finally beginning to spin again ever since that unbearable day three months ago.

First, the infection protocols were lifted, meaning they were allowed in his room and were not required to wear protective gear to enter. (It would be prudent to mention that they could visit any time they wanted during visiting hours, too, except the nurses never bothered making them follow visiting hours in the first place because of the nature of Danny’s case.) Second, the Governor paid Danny a visit late one night and stayed for several hours, talking with Steve, Eric, and the team, as they all watched Danny sleep. Surprisingly enough, he was able to keep his emotions in check – Steve was sure he was going to lose the battle of wills a few times there but he stayed stoic. Steve couldn’t really blame him if he did, since the last three months had been a roller coaster for everybody directly involved with Danny’s case. Third, the media caught wind of Danny’s miraculous return and reporters soon began flooding the hospital lobby like a nasty case of spontaneous combustion. HPD and Five-O spent half an afternoon simply trying to get them out of the hospital building as not to disturb staff and other patients. Although, one journalist somehow managed to make it past the barricade and into Danny’s room, where he quickly became the unlucky victim of Steve’s right cross. Which brought them to the fourth and final thing: all members of the press were barred from entering the hospital, and a still-unconscious Danny was moved indefinitely to the VIP suite under strict orders from the Governor, granting them sitting quarters inside of his hospital room and the desired seclusion from any prying eyes.

After his surgery, Dr. Lawson told them Danny could wake up at any moment once they had officially taken him off the anesthesia.

But when he still hadn’t woken up two days later, he explained that it was probably due to a mixture of the anesthesia and his extreme exhaustion of the last three months, and that they just had to be patient.

\--

It was early on the morning of day three when it happens.

Steve is promptly _not_ dozing but he is nodding off now and again. He had been dazedly observing the fading bruises on Danny’s face and the healing cut above his right eye, his hand intertwined with Danny’s. And it’s because of this that his tired eyes didn’t even spot it at first. When he passes over it again, he assumes he had been dreaming or wishfully thinking to the point of seeing what he so badly wanted to see.

But then his brain eventually does catch up to what is happening in front of him: Danny is waking up.

Steve is on his feet before he can even finish the thought.

“Danny, Danny. Can you hear me, buddy?” He frantically leans over to push the nurses’ button, a groggy Danny still struggling with getting his eyes to stay open.

Steve leans in close, rubbing his hand in Danny’s. “I’m right here, Danno, I’m right here.”

Danny’s eyes open just wide enough for Steve to see the recognition in his eyes at his nickname – albeit, slow and unfocused but still there –, before he succumbs back into an unconscious dreamland.

Dr. Lawson and Nurse Reigns descend on them seconds later, and Steve is struggling to keep the tears in his eyes and the grin from stretching across his face.

“He woke up, he woke up. I swear, he just woke up.”

Dr. Lawson checks Danny’s monitors, Nurse Reigns looks over Danny’s drips, both of them making sure everything is in order and running smoothly.

He nods, seemingly reassured and confident. “Good, good. That means he’s coming back to us. It’ll probably happen a few more times, him waking up and going back to sleep. He’s not strong enough yet, so it’ll take him a couple of times to push through that final hurdle of staying awake longer than a few seconds. But this is a good sign, Steve. A very good sign.”

He smiles encouragingly at Steve, before clapping him on the shoulder and turning to confer with Reigns about something on Danny’s chart.

Steve tries to calm his racing heart and get his thoughts into a working order, but all he can seem to do is shakily wipe at his cheeks while the thought _He's coming back to me_ runs on a loop through his mind, his smile now threatening to break his face.

_He's coming back to me, he’s coming back to me._

\--

The second time it happens, Steve isn’t even there.

He’d left the hospital for half an hour, an hour _tops_ , in order to shower, change into a fresh pair of clothes because he’d been wearing the same ones going on three days now, and grab something to eat that wasn’t from the cafeteria or a take-out carton. He didn’t want to, but after one look from each of his team members, he'd caved, knowing he probably looked like he needed it.

When he gets back to the hospital, Kono is crying and Chin’s smile is trembling and Dr. Lawson is checking Danny’s monitors and chart again.

Steve blanches, belatedly realizing what all he missed in the small window that he was gone.

“He woke up, Steve, he woke up. He was awake for almost 15 seconds,” Kono squeals, the relief and excitement rolling off of her in waves.

“That’s longer than the first time, we’re getting closer.” Dr. Lawson says, as he reads over Danny’s chart for the umpteenth time.

Steve brushes aside his disdain at not being there to deal with later, and has Kono and Chin repeat everything that happened, detail for detail.

_Because Danny’s coming back to him._

\--

The third time it happens, Steve and Eric are the ones there.

Steve’s _reluctantly_ fallen asleep next to his bedside, hand as always molded with Danny’s and Eric reading a book by the window.

Steve isn’t really sure how it happens because, one second, he’s lightly sleeping and everything’s quiet; and the next, Eric’s on his feet and yelling at Steve to wake up.

He jolts awake, disoriented, eyes trying to take in the sight of Danny struggling to wake up again.

“Eric, go get a nurse,” Steve says. “And see if Dr. Lawson is out there!” he calls over his shoulder to a sprinting off Eric, book discarded haphazardly on the floor.

“Danno, it’s me, it’s Steve.” Steve croons softly, rubbing Danny’s small hand in between both of his. “Can you hear me, buddy?”

Danny’s eyes don’t take as long to focus on Steve this time around, and when they do, Steve feels a burst of warmth in his chest at seeing those pools of sky blue again, awake and looking at him.

“Hey, buddy,” Steve says, his throat, unsurprisingly, clogging up with emotion. “Are you with us this time?”

Danny blinks, confused, before his hand slowly climbs its way to his face in order to figure out why it’s so hard to breathe. When he feels the tube sticking out of his mouth, he starts to panic.

“Danny. It’s okay, hey, hey, it’s okay.” Steve puts his hands on Danny’s shoulders, trying to calm him. “It’s helping you breathe, everything’s okay. You’re okay.”

When it doesn’t seem to work, he tries switching tactics. He brings the hand that’s sandwiched in between his and lays it above his heart, covering it with one of his hands.

“Breathe with me, Danno. C’mon, focus on my breaths. In…and out...”

The feel of his chest rising and falling under Danny’s hand seems to act like a balm to Danny’s panic, soothing and gentle, until Danny’s able to time his breaths alongside Steve’s and the panic is receding almost entirely from his eyes. And just as Danny’s breaths become even with Steve’s, Dr. Lawson and Nurse Reigns flow in with a wide-eyed Eric trailing behind them.

“He started panicking about the breathing tube,” Steve reports to Dr. Lawson, who comes around to the side of the bed Eric had just vacated.

Steve makes to move away from Danny to give the professionals room to work, when Danny suddenly latches onto Steve’s wrist with wide, frantic eyes.

“It’s okay, I’m not leaving,” Steve murmurs. “I’m just going over there…to…” Steve trails off when Danny grips his wrist tighter, eyes widening even further and the panic seeping back in _much_ quicker than it left.

Steve’s grateful that Dr. Lawson speaks up because he isn’t sure he can keep the thickening emotion in his throat from bubbling out of him. “It’s okay, Steve. We’ll work around you.”

Steve nods with his heart in his throat, swipes his cheek with the back of his hand, and sits back down in his chair, before taking Danny’s hand in between both of his.

Danny immediately relaxes, interlacing his fingers with Steve’s and shaking Steve to the core.

“Danny, my name is Dr. Lawson. I’m sorry we had to meet under such circumstances.” Dr. Lawson says as he’s putting on his gloves, making eye contact with Danny and giving him a soft, comforting smile.

Danny nods briefly, eyes wary and hand tightening on Steve’s almost reflexively.

“I’m afraid I need to do something that is going to be very painful for you,” Dr. Lawson murmurs, remorsefully. “Your throat has undergone significant damage, and unfortunately, it was necessary for us to intubate you for the time you were unconscious. I am going to have to take it out, now, since you’re awake long enough for us to know whether or not the removal will cause any further damage. But it’s going to very painful.”

Danny squeezes his eyes shut, grimacing, before opening them again and nodding. Steve chokes.

Dr. Lawson nods, breathing a sigh of relief. “We can’t administer any numbing medicine for you, I’m afraid, but we can give you some morphine once it’s out. So just bear with me for the next few seconds, and I promise we’ll take care of you, okay?”

Danny nods, pulling Steve closer with a quick tug.

“I’m right here, Danno,” Steve says, catching Danny’s eye while Dr. Lawson and Reigns, the nurse, ready themselves. Steve runs his fingers lightly through the hair at his temple. “Just squeeze my hand as hard as you can and it’ll be over before you know it.”

Danny nods, closing his eyes again, obviously needing a moment to steel himself.

“Ready?” asks Dr. Lawson.

Danny braces and Steve nods.

It’s _gut-wrenching_ , that’s the only word Steve can think of to describe the inner turmoil he feels at watching Danny in this depth of pain. And it splinters his soul even more to realize that the tightest grip Danny can do is a prominent display of just how extremely weak he is. He’d move heaven and earth to switch places with him and endure it himself, and he _can’t_. There are tears streaming down Danny’s face by the end of it, highlighting his bruises and leaving trails of sorrow across Steve’s heart and nearly breaking it in two.

Dr. Lawson finally gets the tube out and hands it to Nurse Reigns, before looking down Danny’s throat and touching his neck for any sign of further injury.

“Okay, we’re good.” He nods to him, who immediately begins pumping morphine into Danny’s IV drip.

“It’s okay, Danno, it’s over.” Steve’s voice cracks, his own tears driving salty pathways down his cheeks. “It’s over, you’re okay.”

Danny’s agony fades as the seconds tick by and, soon enough, he’s fighting sleep again. He pulls lightly on Steve’s hand again, eyes drooping. Steve leans in close, touching his temple to his and vowing to protect this beautiful man for the rest of his natural-born life.

“Sleep. I’ll be right here when you wake up, I promise.”

Danny leans into Steve’s touch, giving Steve’s hand the softest of squeezes, before slipping into a deep, painless slumber for the fourth time that week.

Steve watches him sleep for a long while, unable to grasp everything that just happened. He vaguely recalls Dr. Lawson patting him on the back before leaving with Nurse Reigns. He comes out of it when Eric touches his arm some time later, and he turns to see him with Kono, Chin, and Lou, who seemed to have arrived sometime between Danny waking up and falling back asleep. They all appear to be just as emotional as he’s feeling, so Steve doesn’t feel too embarrassed about the tear tracks on his cheeks.

They all naturally come together, do a sort of weird group hug, before settling in to wait for the next time Danny wakes up and catching up on the latest Kelly/Kalakaua cousin drama.

 _Everything’s gonna be okay because Danny is coming back to them_ , Steve thinks to himself.

_He’s coming back to me._

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I reached 10k words! Honestly never thought I'd post this story, so this is a surprising milestone for me ;)
> 
> Hope you like it!

\--

Steve isn’t sure what he was expecting when Danny woke up to this new world that he would have to live in after everything that happened to him.

Maybe a Danny without the Danny, just a shell of what was left over.

Maybe a Danny that couldn’t stop weeping, an endless waterfall of tears for a life once lived.

Maybe a Danny that curled in on himself, shutting anything and everything out, in an effort to protect himself from the onslaught of all the evil inflicted on him.

Steve had unconsciously been preparing for any and every possibility since that fateful day ninety days ago when the rug of life was slipped out from underneath him and he couldn’t catch his breath. He’d prepared himself for the worst; no matter how heart-clenching, soul-shredding, world-shattering it may have been. He knew the turmoil that Danny was going to endure would be all-encompassing – emotionally, mentally, psychologically, physically; covering every part of his existence – and that it wouldn’t be anything less than his humanity being upended and torn into a million different pieces.

Steve has been in this place, knows how it feels, what it does to a person – but never to the extent that Danny has experienced, is experiencing, and will experience.

And that makes Steve more anxious than he has ever been in his entire life.

He’d rather go ten rounds with an MI-5 rogue operative than watch the one person he loves most in this world endure what Steve knows is waiting for him on the other side of consciousness.

So, you can imagine, the afternoon that Danny wakes up for the first time since the removal of his intubation tube and listens to Dr. Lawson explain his injuries in detail, that Steve is a ball of anxiety so tightly wound, he feels ready to explode at any given moment.

He’s over-thinking, over-stressing, over-playing every worst possible outcome that could happen, so much so, that he is trembling and his breathing is nearing hyperventilation. The walls are closing in on him, spots are dancing across his vision as Dr. Lawson leaves the room, and his teeth are clenching so hard that his jaw is creaking.

_C’mon, Steve, pull it together._

_…one breath in…one breath out…_

He closes his eyes in order to regain some semblance of control of his impending self-destruction, but he can only last a few seconds before he has to open his eyes again to reassure himself that Danny’s here, that Danny’s alive, that Danny’s…smiling at him?

Steve falters, confusion muddling his imminent breakdown and slowing his racing pulse.

 _Danny_ is smiling at him.

Danny _is_ smiling at him.

Danny is _smiling_ at him.

Steve wasn’t expecting this. He planned for every other outcome, every likely result, every possible scenario that could wither away everything he ever cared about on this planet.

What he _hadn’t_ planned for was a _smiling Danny_ , motioning for him to come over and sit on the hospital bed with him, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

In a haze of confusion, he eventually gets his feet to unfreeze from the floor and tentatively takes the now-open spot on the bed, trying to make himself breathe at a normal rate.

Except Danny then, reaches out and cradles his head with such softness that his heart, so unbelievably chafe from the last three months, rips open and bleeds without hesitation.

It’s the gentleness of this man, wounded so much by the world’s hardness, which breaks him.

It catches him so off-guard, so off-kilter, that he doesn’t even know he’s crying until Danny’s tenderly kissing his tear-streaked cheeks and rocking him as three months’ worth of heartache crawls out of the hole he’d buried so deeply inside the darkest parts of his soul.

His sobs feel like screams, his tears like blood, and his whimpers like earthquakes.

It’s all-consuming and liberating at the same time.

By the time his sobs pitter out into broken hiccups, blurred vision, and stinging cheeks, Steve’s head is resting in the crook of Danny’s right shoulder and his fingers are carding through Steve’s hair softer than anything he remembers feeling.

His chest feels as light as a feather, soaring above the clouds, and giving him life after months of nothing but deep-seated lostness.

It’s backwards, Danny comforting Steve; but Steve can’t seem to do anything but let himself melt into his arms.

Because it’s everything he’s been without.

It’s the missing piece of his life.

It's _home_.

Eventually, after a while of just simply breathing him in, taking it in deeper than he ever has before – underneath the smell of antiseptic and iron, there’s the familiar twinge of something he can only describe as _Danny_ , still there after all this time –, Steve pulls back.

Danny’s looking at him, with those beautiful, bright blue eyes, and Steve can see _so much_ there.

And he knows, right here in this moment, that he wasn’t the only one wishing for _this_ , for _them_ , for _happily ever after_ , over the last three months.

Danny’s looking at him like he holds the moon, Steve’s skin is singing the same tune, and the happiness and relief bubbling up inside of him is making him feel like his heart has been set ablaze.

Danny’s fingers trace Steve’s face, outlining the contours and dips and molds and licking his skin with flames. When he finally speaks, it’s a whisper and with more love than Steve’s ever witnessed in his entire life:

“I love you.”

Steve’s eyes close, and Danny kisses his eyelids.

“I couldn’t die without telling you that.”

As he speaks, his lips tickle Steve’s eyelashes and his whisper of love gives his veins power.

The tension seeps out of him like raindrops, and it leaves him sagging against Danny like a limp ragdoll. He wraps his arms around Danny’s small frame, hugging him close and burying his face in his collarbone.

“I love you so much.”

Nurse Reigns finds them asleep like that later, wrapped around each other and their smiles buried in each other’s skin like hidden secrets, and neglects to wake them.

And when they wake up several hours later, still fitted together like the last two pieces of a puzzle, they watch the sunset together with more contentment than Steve even knew existed.

 _Everything is gonna be okay_ , Steve thinks to himself, as he gets lost in those love-soaked blue irises. _Yeah, definitely okay._

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	7. Chapter 7

\--

It wasn’t sunshine and rainbows from there on out.

The first time Danny woke up from a nightmare, it took Steve ten minutes to calm him down. And even then, a long time for the shadows to fade from his eyes.

Steve knows because he laid even with Danny on the hospital bed, close enough to touch noses, and watched the storm rage inside those beautiful eyes. Whenever Steve thought the evil was prevailing and Danny was getting sucked back into his haunting memories, he would intertwine their fingers, rest his lips on the back of his hand, and will his presence to banish the demons back into the dark.

It was the affection in Danny’s responding smile, crinkling in the corners of his eyes, and a fond bump to his nose that let Steve know they were winning the war.

When Steve and Nurse Reigns were helping him to the bathroom one morning, they received quite the fright when they discovered blood in his urine. Turns out, his kidneys had developed a severe urinary tract infection sometime during the last three months, causing blood cells to leak into his urinary tract. They put him on a urine drainage bag in order to be able to monitor his urine output while they tried eradicating the UTI.

The advantage of it all was that it was easier on Danny than having to get out of bed each time he had to go to the bathroom – he’s still incredibly weak and fragile.

Danny’s immune system has become so compromised from his injuries that he's extremely perceptible to germs. He developed a cold that progressed to pneumonia within hours. The fever broke two days later; but because he couldn’t keep anything down and was already way too malnourished, they were forced to put him on a feeding tube.

Danny mentioned to Steve late one night, when they were curled up together on his bed, that he actually preferred the tube since he wasn’t used to the act of eating anymore. Steve tried his best to school his emotions from that mental image; yet Danny didn’t say anything when Steve’s tears eventually fell into his scruffy hair, just pulled him closer.

The bright side, however, was that despite how bleak the whole situation seemed to be, him and Danny had never been more enamored with each other.

Between sponge baths and urine bag changing, they were all goofy smiles and smitten eyes. It would be bordering on ridiculous for the others involved, if it didn’t brighten the situation the way it did. Because, really, they went three months thinking they would never get the chance to express the love that was building up inside of them; and now that they can, it’s brightening even the darkest parts of reality.

And there were enough dark parts to fill the whole hospital with gloomy days and heavy hearts. So, Steve would take honeymooning and besotted looks and heart-swelling for as long as he could.

And he knew that everyone else felt the same.

\--

One of Steve’s new favorite pastimes had quickly become watching Danny sleep.

Unfortunately, nightmares were a regular issue. And Steve was always there to help him sort through the lingering demons whenever Danny needed him.

But the times that Danny wasn’t being haunted by past-lived ordeals and pain-filled memories, the way Danny slept was nothing short of mesmerizing. Those moments were rare, so very rare, but they did happen.

And it’s those moments that make all this chaos seem survivable.

Like today, for example.

Up close, Steve could see every little detail that makes up the one person he loves more than life itself: the crinkles in his forehead, shifting with a gentleness that’s still there even after being exposed to so much of the world’s sharp edges; the softest of smiles hinting at his lips, illuminating anything and everything within a fifty-foot radius; the fingers of his right-hand open and relaxed on the bed, wilting away Steve’s doubts into the Hawaiian breeze.

It hits Steve all over again, the long-desired beauty of it, and causes the ever-familiar lump to form in his throat.

Danny sniffles and releases a susurrus of breath, his unconscious smile growing even bigger.

The tears fall.

Steve lets them.

His cheeks hurt from grinning.

Danny lets loose an adorable snort that somehow seems to bring him back from unconsciousness, and Steve doesn’t think he’s loved anything more in his life.

He wakes slowly, eyes blinking away the exhaustion he’s been carrying for the last three months. When his eyes finally focus on Steve watching him, he smiles warmly. It’s small and sleepy and his eyes crinkle in the corners in a way that is just so _Danny_ , Steve’s breath catches. He closes his eyes, still fighting sleep, and his hand slowly meanders its way over to Steve’s and fills the spaces in between their fingers.

It’s everything Steve never knew he needed.

“Hey,” he hums _contentedly_ and Steve thinks his heart might seriously explode any minute.

“Hey,” Steve whispers back, unable to manage anything more.

“I could get used to waking up like this.” His eyes are sparkling a little when he opens them and a few more tears fall from Steve’s eyes.

“I could get used to seeing you sleep like that. You looked so peaceful,” Steve says, wiping at his nose.

Danny’s smile deepens a little. Anybody else probably wouldn’t have noticed, but Steve is so unbelievably in-tune with Danny that it’s easier to see than his own reflection.

“It’s easier when you have good dreams.”

Curiously hopeful, “What’d you dream about?”

“You.”

Steve’s eyes close.

“Us.”

Danny kisses the renewed stream of tears on his cheeks with such tenderness that Steve’s hands shake and a sob gets stuck in his throat. Steve fists his hand in Danny’s gown, Danny cups Steve’s jaw, and their foreheads lean together almost naturally.

They breathe in tandem, uncaring about anything outside that room. And Steve feels like he’s floating for once, not every possible emotion he’s ever felt weighing him down into the depths of the earth.

He knows it won’t last, that this isn’t some easy thing that will pass quickly. But for now, he just basks in it, basks in _Danny_ , basks in _them_.

And it’s hard not to believe everything will be okay when he does that.

It’s not sunshine and rainbows. But they’re healing, together, and that’s really all that matters.

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friends, if you don't like the content of the story because it's heavier than others, please read the tags. I added them specifically to avoid any possible triggering. I even gave it a higher rating, just in case. I have taken every necessary precaution. So, please, don't leave rude comments. You can not read it, no one is forcing you to. I don't deserve rude comments after all the precautions I took. Please take them elsewhere.

\--

“Just tell me.”

Smirking, Steve shakes his head as he helps Danny loop his arm through one of his old Navy shirts.

“Nope.” He pops the “p” just to be a pain.

“Tell. Me.” whisper-drawls Danny, stubborn as ever.

“Mmm-mmm,” hums Steve, successfully getting the second arm through the other hole.

“Steven…” warns Danny, whisper muffled through the shirt as his head gets caught on the way out of the head-hole.

“Daniel…” mimics Steve, enjoying the huff of annoyance from Danny way too much.

Danny’s head pops through the hole finally, hair all ruffled and askew, and he glares at Steve. Although, the affection is clearly warring with his annoyance and completely contradicting his glare; and, as a result, Steve can’t help but kiss the spot between his eyes where the crinkles are furrowed.

Danny sighs; it’s all affection and Steve’s chest warms because _this_ , this is what life is like when you’re madly in love.

Steve chuckles, wrapping his arms around Danny and pressing his face into his neck to breathe him in. It’s become one of his favorite things to do.

Danny melts into his arms without thought and kisses Steve’s earlobe. “You’re impossible,” the air from his whisper tickling the tip of his ear.

Steve hums into Danny’s neck. “You love me.”

“Of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re a Neanderthal sometimes.” The confidence in his whisper bellies his soft insult and it makes Steve smile.

They stay like that for a while, quietly soaking it in, when Steve suddenly can’t hold it in any longer:

“The Mets finished second in the League.”

Danny immediately pulls back, eyes narrowing. “Don’t play with me, Steven. This is serious business.”

Steve holds his hands up in surrender. “Honest. Second in the League, two months ago.”

Danny eyes him for a minute; and just as Danny’s guard crumbles and he really starts to believe him, Steve shatters it because he can:

“Braves were the first, though.”

Danny smacks him on the arm – distantly, Steve is wishing more than anything that it would _hurt_ instead of just represent how extremely weak he is – and laughs through his shock.

“You are the worst. I knew it!”

Steve eyes fill with love and he buries it in Danny’s skin as he lathers his face with kisses. Which only spurs Danny’s laughter on even more, and by the end of it, they’re a puddle of laughing tears and aching stomachs and it’s all beautiful.

Sometime later, Steve’s phone vibrates with a text from Rachel. _We’re here._

She brought Grace to see Danny; it’ll be her first time to talk and be with him since getting him back, and the whole thing is nerve-wracking, to say the least. They debated not even letting Grace see him until he healed some more, so his appearance wouldn’t scare her; but if there’s anything that Steve’s learned over the past three months, it’s that Gracie is one of the strongest people he’s ever known and she’s only seven years old.

So, he voted that she could handle it, and Danny and Rachel agreed.

But that didn’t mean they didn’t try to make him look better: a beanie, shirt and sweatpants that are easy on his skin from Steve’s closet instead of that gloomy gown – Steve definitely felt a rush of relief and adoration at seeing him in something other than that doom-and-gloom gown and something of _his_ –, covering the urine bag and feeding tube, a sponge bath to clean him up a bit more, etc.

He still looks too thin, bruised, and small, but it’s a vast improvement, so they’ll take what they can get.

Steve sees them waiting in the hallway, purposefully away from the window so that Grace can’t see him just yet. Rachel’s apprehensive and nervous expression is clear as day; but then Gracie is wrapping herself around his legs and his heart is lurching at the gesture, still, after all this time.

Steve bends down to give her a proper hug, before pulling away to look her in the eye for this next part.

“Gracie, you remember how I said Danno was hurt a lot when he was gone?”

She nods, a brief flash of anger swiping across her face protectively. It makes Steve smile.

“And because he was hurt, he doesn’t look all that good. So, it might be scary at first, because his skin is funny colors and he’s a lot smaller than what he used to be.”

She nods, listening aptly.

“Danno, your mom, and I talked about not letting you see him like that until he got a bit better. But we decided that since you’re very mature for your age, and that because you miss your Danno, you’d be okay.”

She nods, vigorously, in agreement. “I can handle it, Uncle Steve. I promise.”

“I know you can." Steve smiles, lovingly rubbing the corner of her mouth with his knuckle.

“And remember, he doesn’t have a voice right now, but he can still whisper.” He leans in conspiratorially, “He’s been practicing.”

She giggles, but nods anyway.

Standing up again, he holds out his hand for her to take. “Ready?”

She answers by slipping her small one into Steve’s, wrapping her small fingers around two of his, and looking determined.

With a deep breath and metaphorically crossing his fingers in his mind, he leads the way back into Danny’s hospital room.

“Danno, look who I found in the hallway.”

When his eyes land on Grace, his smile is bright and Steve thinks he can see tears in his eyes from where he’s standing. “Hey, Monkey.” He whispers, but it feels like a shout in the once-extremely quiet room.

Grace doesn’t say anything, just stares at Danny with wide eyes.

Danny shoots Steve a worried look, but Steve holds up his hand as if to say _give her a second._

Eventually, after a minute or two of suspended silence, her feet unglue from the floor and she walks slowly to the side of Danny’s bed.

“Can I hug you, Danno? I don’t want to hurt you, so it can be a small one,” her voice is surprisingly steady and cuts through the tension like a knife, and Danny chuckles with immense relief.

“C’mere,” Danny whispers, pulling her close and hugging her tight to himself.

Steve smiles as he watches the two people he loves most on this planet, and it deepens even more when he hears Gracie’s small voice again, “I really missed you, Danno. Steve doesn’t make as good of pancakes as you.”

Steve scoffs dramatically for Grace’s sake, and Danny’s laughing into her hair.

“I missed you too, Monkey. I really missed you.”

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would first like to say that I am really sorry for the delay in updating. This past month has been insane: I finished my summer internship (which is usually where I would write the next chapter like clockwork), I moved back to college for my last semester, and I was having health problems.
> 
> The reason I tell y'all this is because the last 2 things are probably going to be causing regular delays for the next few months. My last semester here at college is Student Teaching, so I won't have the ample amount of time that I'm used to having. And my health problems are chronic and like to demand to be the center of my life on a regular basis and, unfortunately, are worse than normal (I can go into that more later).
> 
> So, if you're still going along this journey with me, I want you to know that updates will be coming slower from here on out. I tried for once a week this past summer, but that will no longer be the case. I will definitely try to keep it shorter than 3 weeks at a time, but I can't make any promises. I will do my best, though :)
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

\--

“Can I ask you something?”

Steve watches as his hands smooth the aloe gel into Danny’s scarred skin.

His burns had been mostly healed when they found him – healed, as in no longer fresh, tender, and as painful as they probably once were. They were definitely more rough and gnarly-looking than Steve cared to admit, though, and he had even caught Dr. Lawson frowning at them on more than one occasion. And when he’d caught his eye, they both knew what the other was thinking without having to use words:

_If only, if only, if only._

But they’d been acting up lately, the scars, and Dr. Lawson recommended aloe gel be applied to his burns a couple of times a day in order to help with the sting and sensitivity to touch.

Steve volunteered, and soon it became one of the more desired activities since he could immediately see the relief and healing it gave Danny. It was like a sunburnt man finding an oasis paradise for the first time after days stranded in the desert. _Hypnotic_ is the only word Steve can think to describe seeing the immediate way his muscles wilted in reprieve, his eyes rolled back in a sense of bliss, and his body become at peace in a land of tension.

It’s a beautiful occurrence in a reality that has inevitably been filled with more rainclouds and shadows than daybreaks and sunsets.

And Steve is so incredibly grateful to bear witness to such a sight.

“Mmphh,” Danny mumbles, completely uninhibited and relaxed to the point of becoming putty underneath Steve’s hands. It takes a while for Danny to actually respond, and when he does, it’s slurred and almost incoherent.

“D’you say s’methin’?”

Steve grins, because this man is the most adorable thing he’s ever seen and he didn’t think it was possible for his heart to be so full of love.

But it is, and there will _never_ come a day that he won’t thank the universe for letting him be able to have this chance.

He finishes applying the aloe gel, hands slimy and slippery but he can’t seem to mind one bit, and kisses the back of Danny’s ear.

That seems to bring Danny back from his blissed-out haze, leaning into the side of Steve’s head and eyes opening slowly and drowsily.

“Good morning,” Steve murmurs into Danny’s ear, his voice having naturally gone low and fond.

Danny giggles and rubs his stubble against Steve's in the most delightful way. Shifting to where he’s facing Steve completely now, he slips his arms around Steve’s waist and tugs him close.

He hums softly, the barely-there vibrations reverberating across Steve’s chest as he rests his cheek atop Danny’s hair. An errant curl tickles the tip of his nose, and Steve’s smile deepens because he is _loving_ the way Danny’s hair naturally dries with no product or styling involved. Steve had never gotten the chance to see such a sight before his disappearance, and now he’s getting as much enjoyment out of it while he has the chance: tangling his fingers into the depths of the golden locks, massaging the scalp hidden under the layers of sun-dried tresses, burying his face into the pillow of softness that was once Danny’s pride and joy.

It’s exhilarating.

It feels like flying.

Eventually, Danny pulls back, his arms still circling Steve’s waist. “So, what did you wanna ask me?”

Suddenly shy, Steve fidgets with his sticky hands that are behind his back, in an effort to not get the lingering gel anywhere else, and tries to form a coherent question in the mass of tangled thoughts that had been plaguing his mind as of late.

“Steven,” Danny whispers, but there’s something in the way he says it that makes Steve look up into his eyes and, _oh_ , is he glad that he did.

There’s a love so deeply imbedded there, Steve feels like he’s staring into the sun. It’s warm, accepting, overwhelming, and radiant. He has to look away for fear of being consumed whole by what he sees, but he doesn’t fail to notice the way it floods his veins like a scorching river. And it hits him, an embarrassing time later, that that kind of love means that he could say _anything_ and Danny would still look at him like he held all the world’s answers.

So he dives in headfirst into unchartered territory and hangs on for dear life.

“I was wondering…” he starts, his voice itchy and rough completely without his control, but he pins his eyes to a point just above Danny’s left shoulder and plows on. “I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just gonna go for it.”

He takes one breath, two. “You’re _happy_. I-I-I don’t mean to sound…ungrateful. Seeing you happy, especially after…everything, is one of the most amazing things I think I’ve ever seen. But…that’s the point: after everything, you’re happy. How--? How’re you happy?”

He finishes, eyes having moved to a spot just below Danny’s chin and a crack having taken residence in his voice. He feels _so many things_ – his whole life, he’s always felt emotions tenfold; all or nothing, go big or go home – but ever since Danny’s disappearance, it’s like all he does is feel things to the extreme. But instead of one emotion at a time, it’s ten thousand of them and it wears him down like wind erosion on the face of a cliff.

It’s exhausting and suffocating and so much more.

Danny’s hand is rubbing circles into the base of Steve’s spine, like the soothing and backwards-comforting person that Danny’s become to him, and the familiarity of it all makes Steve swallow thickly.

Steve finally works up the courage to glance up at him, and when he does, it’s to see him smiling up at him with a softness Steve's never seen on him before. It makes his skin tremble yet also seems to smooth the rough edges of his heart all at once, and it leaves Steve breathless for what he’s going to say next.

Danny pulls back a little, adding some space in between them and his hands falling to Steve’s waist again, and Steve feels the weight of what’s about to be said floating in the air.

“At the beginning, the first few days, it was hope. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that you guys would find me, that _you_ would find me. I held onto that thought stronger than I held onto anything else.”

Steve doesn’t move, entranced by the existence and the importance of those words.

“But then days turned into weeks which turned into months…” Danny looks out the window, his face pensive and distant. “I didn’t doubt that it was still true, but it wasn’t enough to keep me going in the small moments. In the end, I believed it would happen, I _knew_ it would happen; but in the moments where everything hurt to the point that I wanted to _die_ , it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be enough.”

He pauses for a long while, lost in moments of a past lifetime, his mouth working as if toying with the words on his tongue.

When he continues again, it’s different.

His eyes are alight with a kind of brightness that Steve doesn’t remember ever seeing on a Danny Williams pre- or post-kidnapping, and it sets his nerve endings aflame.

“It came to a point where I had to live for _myself_. Yeah, you and Gracie and the team kept me going at times. But in the moments where I needed to pull myself together, stuff the pity party back into the dark corner, and remember that I was _still breathing_ , I needed to do that for _me_. So, I made a deal with myself, maybe even with God or the universe, but I told myself that if I made it out alive, if I was still a part of this world when you and the team would finally find me, I wouldn’t take another day for granted. I wouldn’t let what happened take anything more from me. I would live the way I always wanted to live.”

Danny’s fingers brush a runaway strand of Steve’s hair back, his fingers ghosting over the top of his ear. “So that’s why I’m happy, babe. I’m living.”

Steve isn’t exactly sure when he started crying, but by the time Danny stops whispering, his cheeks are coated with liquid saltiness and his hands are quivering. The foundation underneath his existence feels wobbly, the words spilling from Danny’s mouth having cracked the basis of his being, so he buries himself in the person who gives him life and listens as he whispers love into his skin.

“It’s okay, I’m okay. We’ll get through this, together.”

And Steve believes him.

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, friends. Thank you for bearing with me!
> 
> I know it's been a month (almost exactly) since I posted last. It has been a chaotic month, and it won't calm down anytime soon until December rolls around for graduation. Just remember: I do think about y'all quite a bit and pour my heart into each chapter when I can!
> 
> Firstly, I wanted to say that I really appreciate all of y'all's sweet words. I deal with chronic pain, an excruciating headache that hasn't gone away in 6 years, and this is where I come to escape from my reality. I was in the Emergency Room just 3 days ago because it became too much to deal with; however, thankfully it is more tolerable now. So, to hear such sweet words about something I do to survive in life, it means more than y'all know!
> 
> Secondly, you may notice that I have gone and edited the nurses to have names. I felt like I had been unconsciously sexist and profession-prioritizing for singling out only Dr. Lawson's name but not the nurses'. So I have gone back and changed them to have names and given them more character substance. I just wanted to mention it!
> 
> Fun Fact: I posted the last chapter, #9, on my birthday. I stayed up 'til 4 am to write, edit, and post it for y'all!
> 
> I hope this was worth the wait! Enjoy!

\--

Steve sniffles, awareness coming back to him in slow waves.

The first thing he sees is the soft dawn rays spilling in through the curtained window, subjecting the hospital room he’s come to know as his second home with the beginning of a new day. Steve’s come to take comfort in that fact, the promise of starting over every morning. Nights filled with nightmares and painful memories and the looming shadows of the darkness have become a customary staple for the souls in these four walls. Mornings always present themselves as a promise of a new day filled with saving and redeeming and electrifying potential.

It’s become his favorite part of the day.

He lets his body grow accustomed to waking up, his muscles stretching themselves into a roused state and his mind uncurling itself from its relaxed position. He buries his face into Danny’s warm neck, relishing the feel of the one thing that holds the contents of his heart.

It takes his still-waking-up brain a little while to comprehend the fact that Danny is not, in fact, deeply breathing like he usually does when he’s asleep.

Steve had become so accustomed to being able to tell Danny’s state of mind through the small tell-tale signs of his body movements – the rate of the rise and fall of his chest, the level of tension in his forever-sore muscles, the different levels of staccato in his breathing like a musical beat. He could tell immediately whether he was suffocating in nightmarish storms, his thoughts lost in a tsunami of drowning emotions, or resting peacefully in clouds of serenity, his heart shedding months of long-fought torment.

It takes him less than ten seconds to figure out which of the two it is.

Resting his cheek on Danny’s shoulder, Steve looks up at the face of the man he loves with his whole being.

He’s awake, his eyes distant in a way Steve has yet to see since finding him again as he gazes out the window, his fingers twisting absently as his mind whirls with so many unsaid things.

Steve’s heart aches.

He reaches up to thread his fingers through Danny’s, bringing their intertwined hands to his lips and holding onto what he knows to be true.

Danny starts from his daze softly, his eyes landing on Steve with the tenderness he's come to associate with him. Although, Steve can see the ghosts hiding underneath the surface, his eyes plagued with a sense of darkness more than he’s seen yet.

“Good morning,” Danny whispers, smile small and still something Steve will never get tired of seeing.

“Not one?” Steve asks, his voice understanding and warm from sleep.

He shakes his head faintly, a ghost of a smile smoothing his lips. His eyes find their way out the window again, but there’s a lighter tint to his gaze than before.

It’s quiet for a while, the tinkering noises of Danny’s machines and the sound of a doctor being paged outside the door the only things that interrupt the comfortable silence. Steve lets it envelop him, settling in his bones and wrapping him up in a cocoon. He finds himself embracing the moment for what it is so much more now, knowing what it’s like for everything to be ripped out from underneath him all too well.

Some time later, Danny’s quiet whisper suspends the calming atmosphere.

“Can you do something for me?”

The question catches Steve slightly off-guard; he doesn’t answer, knowing it was only rhetorical and that Danny already knows he’d do absolutely anything for him.

When Danny’s eyes land on him again, they’re bright with a sort of vivacity and it leaves slivers of anticipation across his skin.

“I need to go to the cemetery today.”

\--

It takes some convincing, some groveling, and some masterminding, but Steve finally gets permission for Danny to leave the safety of his hospital room for his first field trip outside those white-washed doors.

They removed his UTI drainage bag the day before, his kidney function having improved magnificently with antibiotics and fluids. They scrounged up an air-filtered oxygen mask for him to wear since his immune system is still incredibly fragile and susceptible to germs. His feeding tube and atrophied muscles are hidden underneath a blanket Steve brought from his house. And, the wheelchair the hospital was letting them borrow wasn’t too hard on his leg muscles.

Steve feels ready to take on the world, the reason behind the field trip still an unknown factor to him, when they pull into the cemetery mid-morning. He helps Danny into the wheelchair, unconsciously checking his face for any sign of pain as he lifts him out of the truck and into the wheelchair below.

Then, Steve grows slightly ashamed of the fact that it doesn’t dawn on him until they’re a few feet from his headstone of why exactly they’re there.

He watches Danny’s form -- the relaxed yet subdued posture of his muscles, the way his eyes take in the words scribed in the stone (words Steve knows by heart now with the number of times he found himself here on many dark, Danny-less nights), and the velvety rays of sunlight bathing his face in yellow and orange.

_“It isn’t the date on either end that counts,_  
_but how they used their dash._  
_For that dash between the dates_  
_represents all the time they spent alive on earth,_  
_and now only those who loved them know_  
_what that little line is worth.”_  
**Peter Gilmore**  
**A loving son and brother**  
**March 2, 1992 – December 15, 2006**

Steve hears the words in his mind, their overturned and overplayed quality loud in his ears.

When Danny breaks the tranquil silence with his whisper, Steve eyes are heavy on his profile, each detail of the man who holds the entirety of his heart accentuated underneath the rising Hawaiian sun.

“It’s his birthday today.”

The breath in Steve’s lungs collapses and he feels it like a harsh wind on a winter day. The whispered words crystallize in the air and his heart throbs in a way that cripples his insides.

“Petey loves his birthday,” whispers Danny, the sound light and feathery despite the heaviness of his words. “Said it was the one day of the year he never felt like he had to pretend to be anyone else.”

Steve watches the words on his headstone come alive in a way that they hadn’t before, creating the life of a vivacious fourteen-year-old boy right before his eyes -- images of mud trailing in the living room after a Little League soccer player, the sound of young laughter reverberating in his ears like the Doppler effect, a huge smile on a brown-freckled, little boy as he blows out his birthday candles.

The air feels thick with so many things unlived and cut short by the evil in this world. It weighs on his skin, suppressing him in a way that wants to choke the life out of him. The memory of a pale fourteen-year-old, lifeless body – _Petey_ – drowning out everything around him and burning his eyes with its inferences.

Danny’s whispering voice brings him back from wherever he found himself heading, his senses in a stark overload from the weight of what’s being said and _not_ said.

“He wanted us to visit him on his birthday,” Danny pauses again, his look of contemplation delicate and luminous. “To come and remember the good that happened even when all there seemed to be was bad, to remember what it was all about: living life to the fullest.”

Ever since Danny had come back to him, he’d been mentally creating this perception of him that was filled with gratefulness, unrepentant joy, and a sense of taking life by the reins and flying by the colors of the wind. Hearing the whispered truths coming from him now, it completely alters everything he’s accumulated up to this point, while also giving emphasis to every last detail. He stores the words in his mind, knowing the importance of them and the way it makes him feel are anything but ordinary, knowing that he’ll be revisiting this moment for many more days to come.

“Happy birthday, Petey.”

It’s short and wistful, but beautiful in a way that encompasses everything Danny has become since returning: wise, beholden, astute, and blithesome.

A ruffling noise behind them catches their attention, and when they turn, they are pleasantly surprised at the sight of their friends, waiting patiently behind them.

Kono seems to be struggling at keeping the tears in her eyes; Eric has a tumultuous smile on his face and, also, seems to be failing at letting the emotion not coat his face; Chin, the ever-calming presence in their lives, even seems to have tears filling _his_ eyes; and Lou has never been one to hide his emotion, unafraid to let the world know he’s feeling too much.

Steve’s never been so grateful to see them in his life.

“Hey, Danny,” Kono says, emotion trickling in her voice but no one says anything.

“Hey, guys.” His smile is the brightest Steve’s seen all day and it illuminates everything down to the tips of his toes.

Danny takes Eric’s hand in his, squeezing it gently, and Steve is confronted, once again, with the fact that everything is going to be okay.

He finds himself thinking so later that night when Danny falls asleep on his chest, after hours of talking with the team in his hospital room, and makes eye contact with them over Danny’s tousled hair.

He's grinning for so many reasons, but the main one being: they may have survived Hell, but they’re going to be okay.

_Together._

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying the new season so far. So much McDanno in store for us, y'all!
> 
> Hope you enjoy ;)

\--

Danny isn’t the only one plagued with haunted images, dancing behind his eyelids, in the middle of the night.

The sun still sleeping below the horizon, it’s the sight of a lifeless Danny, eyes open and empty of life, that jars him up and into consciousness early one morning.

He doesn’t dare move for fear of waking the man in question next to him. So instead, Steve takes in a shaky breath, tears rolling down his face unabandoned and a tremor taking residence in his bones, and wills the darkness to creep back into the corners without fuss.

_He’s safe._

_He made it._

_He’s here with you._

Steve’s mantra echoes in his veins, his heart heavy and pulsating his anguish. It doesn’t matter how many days have passed since finding him, the scene of Danny’s war-torn body lying in that horrifying place will never leave him. And he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that when he’s old and wrinkled, he’ll still feel this momentous avalanche of emotions he’s currently sifting his way through every time the memory revives itself before his eyes.

His only saving grace is what really happened – instead of coming upon a soulless Danny Williams like in his disturbing dreams, he’d found him still clinging to life with that stubborn, Jersey spirit that’s always embodied the existence of the person he loves more than life itself.

When Steve feels arms encircle his waist and a face press into his temple, he can’t actually help the way his body immediately melts in relief.

_He’s safe._

_He made it._

_He’s right here with you._

Like they always do, the words take root even deeper inside of him when he feels the heat of Danny’s skin and hears his breathing louder than his own thoughts.

“It’s okay, you know.” His whisper is gentle, the words caressing his heart and healing the still-raw scrapes on its surface with overflowing love.

A fresh wave of tears tumbles – not from turmoil, but rather a sort of gratefulness at being accepted so unconditionally by this beauty of a man – at what he’s really saying: _It’s okay to feel. It’s okay to hurt. It’s okay to feel helpless. We have to in order for us to heal. Because we will, together, one nightmare at a time._

“I know,” he whispers back, pressing more into him and resting his own arm on top of his, conjoined in more ways than one.

After a while of just feeling and being present with each other, Danny whispers again. “I don’t know if you know this, but I get them too.”

A snort of laughter escapes Steve unexpectedly at the joke, and he can feel Danny’s muted one tickling his three-day-old scruff.

Chuckling through his tears, Steve turns toward him and buries his face into his neck, enfolding himself around Danny’s small body and letting his soul crawl out towards this man. It never fails to surprise him how strong that pull towards him is. It’s like two magnets finding each other through sheer, willful force, unwilling to accept any obstacle that’s standing in the way.

Danny pulls back some seconds, minutes, hours later – Steve doesn’t really know. He’s discovered that time is like that when in love, superfluous and non-existent when around the person you hold so much of your heart for.

His gaze roams Steve’s face, his fingers following their pursuit and leaving trails of heat in its wake. His lips are upturned just slightly in the corners, and his eyes are teeming with a sort of all-consuming fondness that leaves Steve’s mouth dry. Steve knows his eyes are reflecting the love that’s filling every inch of him. He lets it consume him from the inside out until he feels like he’s an exploding star, flaming brightly and consuming everything in its path.

When he cups Steve’s cheek with a tenderness that’s equivalent to nothing Steve’s ever witnessed and leans in to touch their lips together for the first time, Steve’s insides flood with a swarm of butterflies taking flight and his whole body seems to come alive.

Danny deepens the kiss, his fingers sliding into Steve’s hair, and Steve can taste a world he’s only just scratched the surface of and the excitement grows palpable beneath his skin. It’s slow and delicate, filled to the brim with love, and wet – so very wet, Steve’s tears having coated each of their lips. But doesn’t that represent them? Their love was formed through tragedy, and they’re healing together, one day at a time. So, their first kiss happening in such a way is nothing short of perfect; Steve couldn’t have imagined a better one if he tried.

They curl up together in bed again without a word, their lips nudging forwards to connect every few minutes as they watch their souls intertwine like they were destined to from the beginning.

A few whispered declarations of love are all that are heard as they fall asleep, swathed around each other, with the knowledge that they’re going to be okay.

Because they have each other.

And that’s all that will ever really matter in a world full of grey.

\--

“Can we come in?”

Chin’s voice is low as his head pokes in through the cracked hospital room door.

Danny smiles warmly at him and nods. He watches as him, Kono, and Governor Denning file in and soundlessly grab a seat to bring closer to the bed. Once seated, their eyes land on a still-sleeping Steve, face buried underneath Danny’s chin and fingers curled into his hospital gown.

“We had a rough night.” Danny whispers by way of explanation, but the Governor raises his hand as if to quickly dispel it, everything already understood.

“By all means.”

“How are you doing, Danny?” asks Kono, her voice genuine and open.

Danny’s fingers caressingly slide into Steve’s hair almost unconsciously. “I’m hanging in there, Kono.”

“Steve told us you might get to start physical therapy soon,” Chin murmurs with a hopeful look.

That seems to lift the mood of the room, and soon they get lost in quiet conversation and catching up and the world righting itself again. The little tension residing in their shoulders seems to dissipate the longer they’re there. The Governor, having not been able to visit since Danny was still unconscious, takes his time in listening and soaking up this moment, letting its optimism and hope for what’s to come rectify all the aching from the last few months. Because despite how distant he can seem to be when it comes to Five-O, even he was deeply affected by the tragedy that struck their world that horrific Tuesday morning.

“He was really worried about you,” Kono begins, eyes on Steve’s sleeping form. “I mean, we all were. But Steve…”

Her voice breaks and she falters, eyes growing misty at the memories of long nights watching Steve wilt away layer by layer the longer Danny was gone. It aches just as much as it did the first time she saw him weeping in his office, his fingers clutching one of Danny’s ties tight enough to lose circulation.

“We're glad to see y’all have talked things through,” Chin finishes for her, his meaning echoing loud and clear: _We’re glad that you guys finally told each other how you feel._

Danny beams, his face glowing as bright as a shooting star plummeting towards the earth.

Tears spring to the others’ eyes at the sight of Danny gazing down at Steve with such devotion that their hearts expand in size so quickly they ache. A different kind of ache, a long-desired ache that satisfies even the roughest parts of their souls.

Danny’s fingers thread through Steve’s hair, his eyes spilling over with fondness. “It was worth it, you know.”

Even though the room was mostly quiet before, everything suddenly grows very still – the air piques with a heaviness that intensifies the moment so much more, the milieu noises of the hospital fall to the side, and his words take on a whole new definition to the world’s continuation.

“I’d go through it all over again if it meant that we were right back here.”

Kono may or may not choke, emotion so thickly clogging up her throat; Chin changes topics before he too succumbs to the weight of what is being said; and the Governor doesn’t even bother pretending the moment isn’t what it is – _hope._

Hope that all of this evil wasn’t for nothing.

If the way Danny, a man who has endured more than any one person should ever have to in ten lifetimes, radiates a love so deep his skin sparkles with it and is grateful for everything leading up to that point, then maybe everything will be okay.

Because that’s what matters, right?

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An extra long chapter since y'all are so nice and bearing with me and my busy schedule :)
> 
> I hope it's worth the wait!

\--

Danny was healing.

Slowly and day-by-day, but it was happening.

And that’s all that seemed to really matter in keeping the world on its axis these days.

His kidney function was almost back to one-hundred percent. The bruises decorating his skin had grown to shades of light pastels instead of vibrant hues that could take your breath away with just one look. Regular strolls through the hospital garden allowed his skin to begin soaking up vitamin D through sunlit rays easier than Steve could will it to. His muscular atrophy was fading, like the morning dew settling on blades of grass through the night, gradual and unhurried. The laceration above his eye was cleaner and healthier than Steve had yet to see it. And the darkness that sometimes plagued the place that had become home to them was beginning to dissipate with every smile and eye crinkle shined upon it.

They started physical therapy for his severely weakened muscles three weeks after he was found. After giving his overly-wrought and depleted muscles time to rest and heal, it was time to start the rebuilding of his strength, and _boy_ , was it something.

It’d been three weeks since Steve’s whole perspective on life changed for the second time in four months; and still, his first reaction to anything thrown Danny’s way is to brace for an explosion. The moment he woke up from his coma, learning about the amputation (that saved his life), the nightmares, the pneumonia, every single detail of the healing process – Steve expected an eruption the equivalent of his skin tearing apart at the seams.

But it never happened.

If anything, every hurdle that was thrown their way (because, _yes_ , they’re in this together), Danny’s smile only deepened and Steve’s heart expanded just a little more every time it was directed his way.

He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t think he ever really would. It honestly blew his mind each time he thought about it and left him grasping for words that couldn’t quite explain how this beautiful man could be so eternally content in the face of agonizing malevolence.

But, _God_ , was he thankful for it.

It made the obstacles in their path seem like speed bumps, the painstakingly horrendous nightmares seem like fleeting notions of a life once lived, the broken pieces of their souls seem like missing puzzle pieces that had always had a place, and the long, dark nights seem like brief glimpses of the back of an eyelid.

It made everything worth it.

To see the way that smile, that glorious, luminous smile, could light up the room, the building, _the street_ – it was the fuel that kept Steve’s heart churning in a battle-weary reality that was rubbed raw down to its very core.

Because if that was any indication, then they might actually make it through this God-awful tragedy.

Together.

\--

It was everything that was involved in a stereotypical, perfect day.

The birds chirping a tune outside the window, the early morning sun spraying its golden beams onto the bed sheets, the heat of his favorite person curled around him, the warmth of naïve contentment for what the day held bubbling inside his chest.

It was everything Steve had ever dreamed a perfect day in life could be.

And yeah, maybe in that dream, he didn’t envision machines metrically beeping, doctors being paged over the speakers like a fast dose of reality, the smell of chemicals that could burn your nose hairs after too many inhales, scars that ornamented a skin that belonged under Steve’s fingers and not anyone else’s.

No, he didn’t envision those things at all. In fact, he’d give anything to learn what life is like without them.

But what he’s _also_ learned is that perfect days don’t exist by themselves.

Perfect days are the days that come when you least expect them; when everything seems to be going right for one magnificent second; when the world feels like a blank canvas, waiting and ready for you to conquer the world with only your breath; when you’re bracing for the black but instead get a myriad of color; when you’re expecting the demons but instead see the angels.

Perfect days aren’t born on their own.

Steve understands this more than ever when he looks into sleepy, blue eyes one Thursday morning and sees a realm of hope and promise that extends far beyond anything he’s ever encountered.

A touch of lips to lips only confirms his theory: perfect days are _made_.

\--

“We don’t have to do this, you know.” Steve murmurs against his lips sometime later, his voice soft and light in the morning solitude of the hospital.

Danny hums faintly, his nose bumping Steve’s with enough reverence to fill a swimming pool. “You just want to keep me to yourself.”

Steve kisses his temple. “You have figured out my cunning plan, how ever did you know?”

Danny’s finger traces his lips, his eyes sparkling with an affection that could cripple the mightiest warriors. “Because I know you.”

It’s truth rings louder than a shout in a cave, and Steve feels it like a tsunami: No one has ever known him better than the way Danny does, and he still loves him with every fiber in his being.

With wet eyes hidden in Danny’s skin, Steve tries for a joke to dispel the rising emotions he seems to always be feeling. “Okay, so maybe I don’t like sharing you, sue me.”

Danny vibrates with a suppressed chuckle and neglects to mention Steve’s tears. Not giving voice to them still keeps them a secret from the world, a secret only shared by the two of them – it’s Steve’s favorite kind.

When Danny pulls back far enough to catch Steve’s eye, Steve’s breath snags in his throat and tangles with his voice at what he sees.

“I will be yours for the rest of our lives.”

Steve lets the words wash over him like a renewal of life. Because up until this point, nothing has ever made more sense. And it’s a wondrous thing to watch the way Danny’s love-infused words burrow into the fabric of existence, alter everything Steve has ever believed in, and reorient the universe.

Because he is Danny’s and Danny is his.

And nothing will ever be truer.

\--

When Dr. Lawson mentioned going on another field trip to rejuvenate everyone involved and Danny opted for going to the Iolani Palace, Steve couldn’t help the pool of anxiety that swirled in his gut.

As much as he enjoyed getting out of the stuffy hospital with Danny last time, the amount of stress and anxiety it caused Steve was a little overwhelming. Steve would hate for something to go wrong and Danny’s healing to be derailed in any way all because they wanted to escape their four-walled home for a few hours.

But because it’s Danny, Steve can’t say no.

So, that’s how Steve finds himself that afternoon, anxious and doubtful that the whole thing is even a good idea, when he sees the looks on everyone’s faces as he wheels Danny into HQ.

And then it clicks for him, the reason why this was so important for Danny, for him, for everyone involved – having Danny back in HQ means everything really is okay again.

Steve sees it all: Kono crying into Danny’s shirt (it’s actually one of Steve’s old SEAL shirts that’s basically been adopted into Danny’s wardrobe); Chin’s shoulders slumping in relief for the first time in months; Lou’s fingers shaking with easily discernible joy; Jerry grinning ear-to-ear as he runs around like a busy host, fluffing Danny’s blanket and moving things out of the way every few seconds; Eric holding one of Danny’s hands in a vice as he watches everyone with unrepressed delight; and even Duke struggling to hold in his tears as he shakes Danny’s hand and gazes at him with a look of utmost respect.

Steve breathes long and hard, everything inside of him _finally_ thawing and loosening. It’s like the weight of a train has been lifted off of him, and he can exhale as freely as a leaf blowing in the wind.

A hand grasps his shoulder, and when he turns, Steve is surprised to see Sam and Callen from the LA-based NCIS division.

“Hey, man,” Steve greets, going in for the hug almost instinctively. “I didn’t know y’all were coming in.”

Steve repeats the process with Callen before pulling back. “Are y’all helping HPD with a case?”

It’s only then that Steve notices the way they’re looking at him: eyes that see everything between the lines yet filled with so much relief for how things have turned out.

Callen shakes his head, glancing over at Danny who is surrounded by the team like one big, happy family ( _o'hana_ ). “No case, we just wanted to see it with our own eyes.”

Steve’s heart aches.

“You really had us scared there,” Sam starts, his line of thinking loud and clear to the three of them. “I know it was Danny, and you love him, but…” He clears his throat. “It’s terrifying watching you grieve, man.”

Steve nods, understanding everything he’s not saying. He watches the way Danny’s smile shines on the others like a beacon, leaving streaks of heat and upturned lips in its orbit. He snatches that familiar warmth and holds it close to his heart because he knows he’ll need it for the days when everything doesn’t seem so clear and doesn’t seem to hold so much potential and isn’t so perfect.

“I’m sorry.” And he means it, he really does.

Sam waves his hand and Callen shakes his head, both of them obviously thinking the same thing.

“Don’t apologize. We understand, probably more than you think.” Danny’s laughing now, the mirth clearly evident in his eyes even from this distance.

“Just tell us this: are you happy?”

Steve doesn’t even have to think of his answer, it’s so heavily entrenched in who he is now.

“More than I ever thought could be possible.”

It’s his words and the confidence in his voice that seem to melt even the coldest hearts, and Steve can see the anxiety in their eyes slowly dissipate until it disappears completely.

“Good, good.” Sam claps Steve on the back. “We’re happy for you, the both of you.”

“Just don’t forget to invite us to the wedding,” Callen half-jokes, and Steve barks out a laugh.

As Steve watches the two of them join the rest of the team and see first-hand what a beautiful man they have among them, his words come back to him:

_More than I ever thought could be possible._

When Danny’s arm binds itself around one of Steve’s and their fingers intertwine together, Steve knows it’s true.

He didn’t know he could be this happy.

But he is, _oh_ , he is.

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Astros won the World Series, y'all. I'm so excited that it's all I can seem to think about these days. Agh.
> 
> Thank you for bearing with me and my busy schedule, you are all awesome!
> 
> I hope you enjoy :)
> 
> PS. I reached 20K words! Whoohoo!

\--

It takes him two full days to make it back to Oahu.

Forty-eight hours of little to no sleep, clenched hands that are starting to bleed from the pressure, anxiety churning harder and faster than his heart can seem to keep up with, bated breath and bloodshot eyes, tremors reverberating throughout his body that make it next to impossible to do anything, and awful, heart-stopping fears running on a loop in his brain the longer the separation lasts.

He should _not_ have left.

Why did he leave?

_Why?_

\--

It started with a phone call.

And Steve knew, he _knew_ all along that it was a horrible idea. But it was Danny who had convinced him that everything would be okay.

And, honestly, any time he heard those words coming from Danny’s lips, it was hard not to believe it.

_“This is McGarrett. Leave a message.”_

“Hey man, it’s me…”

Steve hung his head, sighing so heavily he thought his lungs were going to fall right out of him, because he was waiting for this. He knew this moment would come the second he picked up the phone to call in any favors he could during those horrid three months.

It's time to pay up.

“...I need your help, I’ve got nowhere else to turn.”

Later when the torrent of terror floods his insides and nearly sucks him back into the pit of destruction he lived in for _months_ while Danny was gone, he’ll replay this moment over and over and wonder why he ever thought he could part from his bedside.

_Because he shouldn’t have left._

\--

Steve stared down at the gauze he was reapplying to Danny’s brutally scarred wrists, the routine of motion soothing the anxiety and apprehension that seemed to be flowing in his bloodstream.

“You’d tell me…” he starts, his voice embracing the quiver that always seems to be hiding just below the surface. He clears his throat, knowing it won’t do much less than convince him he is stronger than a few tears. “You’d tell me if you didn’t want to me go, right?”

He chances a glance up at Danny, and his heart is very much rewarded that he did. Because all he can see for _miles_ in eyes full of ocean blue waves is a realm of love so thick his skin feels heated from the inside out.

What he _doesn’t_ see is discord and conflict because, of course, Danny wouldn’t hate him for this.

He’s still getting used to the idea that Danny will never hate him for anything. Three unbearable months of internally blaming, scorning anything and everything, and believing himself unworthy of any happiness ever again – to swiftly find out it was all for naught as Danny and accusations of guilt don’t belong in the same airspace.

Danny is _in love_ with him and that’s clear for anyone within a thousand-foot radius.

Danny’s hand cups Steve’s cheek, the tenderness in his gaze lighting his soul on fire and his fingers sliding into his hair like a gentle breeze in a love-starved, scorched land. His lips caress the skin near his temple, murmuring soft everythings into his ear:

_Everything’s going to be okay._

_You’ll come back to me._

_I’m safe here._

_I love you._

Steve breathes the words in, trusting anything and everything that spills from those beautiful, powerful lips. He captures them in a soft press of his own, promising with lips and not words, trusting that he’s right.

Because if anybody can be, it’s Danny.

And if he, maybe, throws up a wishful prayer to God or the universe, then, well. Can you really blame him?

\--

“Thanks, man. I know things haven’t been easy back home, lately…” He pauses, the weight of everything not being said echoing between the walls. His eyes coat with a film of distance and Steve’s heart coils painfully at the reminder.

“But I appreciate you coming and helping,” He claps his hand on Steve’s shoulder. “I know you owed me, but coming when I called, with everything that’s happened back home… I can’t –” His voice grows clogged, images of Steve falling apart piece by piece in front of his eyes and through the phone still eat at him.

He clears his throat, “I can’t even imagine. You have _more_ than made up, man, more than made up.”

Steve blinks rapidly, unwilling to cave to the emotion every time it threatens to overwhelm him, and accepts the brotherly hug and the comfort it gives him.

“Steve! Steve! Hurry!”

It’s the man’s shout from the other room that draws him out of the moment and into reality with a sharp jerk that leaves him winded. Because he feels it, the swallow of dread that seems to be sinking in his heart and consuming him all at once: Something is _wrong_.

 _Danny_.

_No. No. No! ___

__He’s in the next room before he knows what’s doing, his eyes gluing to the news segment playing on the small tv, and the words assault him from all directions._ _

_“…was rescued after three months in captivity, there’s been an incident involving Detective Danny Williams. The hospital is currently under lockdown as authorities investigate. All we know is that Detective Williams has been attacked…”_

__It’s like he’s watching himself: the way his throat closes up, trapping any and all air that he may need into an inaccessible cage; the darkness creeping on the edges of his vision, looming in the predatory way that it does; the tremble in his hands that seems to be spreading throughout his entire body like a disease._ _

__He doesn’t snap out of it until he’s hitting the wall behind him and three faces are swimming in front of him with their mouths moving in a way that seems familiar but he just can’t quite grasp._ _

__“Steve, Steve.”_ _

__“Can you hear us?”_ _

__“Where’s your phone?”_ _

___Phone, his phone._ _ _

__That seems to spur him on – for now – as he goes for his phone, his connection, his lifeline to Danny._ _

__There’s a message waiting for him, it’s from Chin._ _

__

_"Don't read this until you're safely out of the field._

_____ _

_Danny was attacked, he’s okay, I promise. But there’s something else you need to know, we’ll stay with him until you get here. I know once you read this you’re on the first flight out._

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_Just remember: he's okay."_

____\--_  
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__By the time he actually makes it to the hospital, he’s verging on full-blown panic-mode._ _

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__The darkness has spread, leaving him with only pinpricks of vision to sift through; the tremors have taken root deep in his physiological system, running rampant throughout his whole body; and his mind is a wasteland for anything that isn’t _Danny, Danny, Danny.___

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__He hasn’t stopped in over forty-eight hours, the moment he first saw the news segment and read Chin’s text, and his body is close to giving out on him._ _

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__But he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care about anything._ _

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__The only thing he cares about is seeing that beautiful, magnificent face in front of him, under his fingers, beneath his lips._ _

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__Anything in between is just an obstacle._ _

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__The nurses see him first and don’t even bother with words as they just understandingly point down the hallway that is heavily lined with protection detail._ _

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__By the time his eyes land on Danny – _safe_ and _sound_ – through the window outside the door, he’s hyperventilating._ _

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__He has to stop; his body is crying out for him to just pause and take a moment to calm himself. But it’s Kono and Lou’s soothing voices and comforting hands doing the work to bring him back from the breath-shorted, crushing, downward spiral he always seems to be right next to._ _

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__He braces himself against the wall, deep breaths coming in faster and stronger the longer he focuses on the draw and pull of his diaphragm. His hands tremble, but not nearly as bad as the moment he heard the reporter’s words echoing in that safe house. The rush of oxygen in his system from his restored breathing seems to be doing an efficient job in fighting off the darkness that’s threatening to cover his vision entirely._ _

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_In. One, two, three, four..._

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_He’s alive._

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_Out. One, two, three, four…_

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_He’s safe._

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He looks up at the ceiling, ridding his eyes of the liquid emotion that always betrays him and takes a long drag of air until he can feel it all the way down to his toes.

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__“He’s okay, Steve. We made sure he was,” Kono’s voice is gentle and calming, contrast to the dark and gloomy voice reverberating throughout his soul. It’s losing its well-worn battle now that sensible voices and glimpses of reality filter in and thump it back into its corner._ _

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__His breathing is almost back to normal when Lou speaks this time. “Go get your man. He’s waiting for you.”_ _

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__And Steve does just that._ _

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__\--_ _

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__“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve have left. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve left…”_ _

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__It’s like a well-rehearsed chant at this point, but the desired audience is here this time and Steve feels the relief flood his veins faster than the oxygen could._ _

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He buries his head in Danny’s neck, all of his senses being swamped at the onslaught of the memory of what home feels like. Small hands find their way back on him – where they belong, his nose embraces the antiseptic and iron in exchange for _Danny, Danny, Danny_. He welcomes the metric beeping next to the bed because it means that he can hear the “I’m okay, I’m safe, I’m here” in return.

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__He starts crying at some point, but the tears are quickly kissed away by soft, pink lips that leave grazes of adoration across his body, whispered declarations of love interwoven into their impressions._ _

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__The relief leaves him like a flood and he’s barely keeping ahold of consciousness at this point. Danny just helps him into a lying position, pulls the blanket over them, and cuddles into Steve’s exhaustion-riddled arms._ _

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__“Sleep, babe. We'll talk later. I’ve got you,” he whispers into Steve’s skin in between loving kisses and Steve is gone before he can even see the lights flicker off._ _

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__Danny tenderly runs his finger across Steve’s hairline, his cheekbones, his brow, his lips; his eyes warm with the kind of love he’s come to understand that’s for Steve and Steve only._ _

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__He nods in acknowledgement at the team switching the light off and closing the door before standing guard in the hallway for what's to come, before curling into the man he loves with his whole being and waiting to fend off any lingering terrors._ _

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__“I love you,” he whispers into a warm neck, hoping those words do their job._ _

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Because Danny knows that what's to come won't be easy, if everything that happened these last few days is anything to go by.

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__\--_ _

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You're looking at a brand-new college graduate! Hardest thing I ever did: getting a college degree while enduring a life of chronic pain. But I did it, and now I need like a billion naps.
> 
> Thanks for bearing with me these past few months. You guys rock.
> 
> Now, we're getting into the back story of what happened during Danny's disappearance, and wow, do I have a lot in store for y'all.
> 
> I hope this answers some questions y'all had, and if not, the next chapter definitely will. I wanted to answer them all this time, but it was turning into a really long chapter, so I split it up. But more answers to come, I promise :)
> 
> Hope this was worth the wait!

\--

“I know this a lot to take in.”

Steve tiredly rubs the heel of his hands into his eyes, his brain still not fully awake with all the information being thrown at him. He’d slept for over eighteen hours, and it’s like his brain is still offline, nothing making any sense.

He’d woken up this morning, for the first time since returning to the hospital, Danny still curled around him – the one sensible thing that’d happened all morning – and they’d had only a few moments of warm kisses, whispered conversations, and contented cuddles – his favorite kind of morning – before the confusion had tumbled in, mixed with the serene atmosphere in the air, and floated around them like the sticky humidity on a hot, summer’s day.

There was so much he didn’t understand and that was only the tip of the iceberg.

“Just…” He waves his hand as if to will the air particles to explain the world’s answers. Opening his eyes and taking a deep breath, he surges on because, _dear God_ , he needed to understand.

“Let’s just start from the beginning.”

\--

It had all started with a knock on the door.

“Hey, guys.” His voice was still scratchy, his mouth tasted like he’d been licking someone’s carpet, and he didn’t even want to _know_ what he smelled like. And yeah, that pretty much decided his next move.

“I think I need a shower. Kono, did you happen to leave extra clothes here from the last supply run you made?” Steve asks her, the rest of the team still filing in from the hallway.

“Yeah, I stuck them in the cabinet right there.”

“I’ll be right back, okay?” Steve says to Danny, his feet already moving in the direction towards the bathroom.

But when Danny’s hand grasps onto his wrist in a sudden flash of motion, he isn’t prepared for the instantaneous drop of his stomach and the feeling of unease that seems to mingle with his blood and spread to the rest of his body. Something was wrong, he could feel it. And, most importantly, he could _see_ it in Danny’s eyes when he turns and their eyes connect – that looming, life-sucking darkness Steve had become so familiar with is now skirting on the edges of Danny’s eyes, a sense of utter fear swirling in his blue orbs like it somehow belongs in this man Steve so irrevocably loves.

Danny’s been back almost a month, and Steve has yet to see that kind of reaction from him – it leaves the blood in his veins running cold.

“Hey,” his voice is soft and his hands find their way back into Danny’s blonde, untamed tresses as he sits back on the bed, close enough that their foreheads are nearly touching.

Danny’s eyes close almost of their own accord; he’s leaning forward to officially connect their foreheads and his hands are gripping onto Steve’s arms in a sort of desperate hold.

“Hey, _hey_.” Steve shakes Danny gently, enough to get his attention onto his words and not whatever is bouncing around inside of his head because Danny’s face has grown more and more pinched and Steve is only growing more and more confused.

“Talk to me.”

When Danny’s eyes open, they’re coated in a thin film and teeming with such intense, unspoken emotion that Steve’s heart cripples from the sight.

“Would you still love me even if I’m not me anymore?” His whisper is tremulous and unsteady, and it rips Steve’s insides to shreds.

Steve's confusion, once hiding beneath the surface ready to take flight any second, is overriding his voice now and it’s conforming to that fear that he thought he’d long since parted from. He can feel its life-sucking tentacles just on the outside of his vision, waiting and prepared to tear into everything he holds dear.

“Danny, what’s going on?”

It’s broken and lost and filled with so much hate for the sight of that awful darkness and fear filling Danny’s eyes and he just _wants to understand_.

The tears in Danny’s eyes are growing thicker, now threatening to spill onto his faintly discolored and bruised cheeks, but his eyes are looking at him and there’s a world inside of them that Steve’s just now seeing, a world where Danny is _scared_. Scared of something to the point of tears, and questioning Steve’s love for him, and no, _no_.

“Would you still love me if I wasn’t the same person you thought I was?”

His tears begin to fall now, and his whisper is barely more than a puff of air, but his distress is leaving the room blanketed in waves of thickening oxygen and Steve feels it in the way it grapples with his soul and suffocates it.

_“Danny.”_

But it’s lost in the chaos and utter turmoil on Danny’s face, and Steve isn’t prepared whatsoever for Danny’s next words:

“Would you still love me if you knew the truth?”

Steve isn’t sure when everything around him dulled into white noise – one second, it’s there; and the next, all he can hear is the thrum of his heartbeat and the rush of his blood in his ears. He has to blink because suddenly his eyes are blurry from unshed tears, and when he does, the tears roll down his cheeks and the sight of an anguished Danny shaking underneath his hands is just too much to take. But he can’t bring himself to look away; it’s shattering his soul into ten thousand pieces, being unable to help this person his heart is so unashamedly attached to, but he can’t force his eyes away from him because it’s _Danny_.

His chest is starting to ache from the pressure of Danny’s words echoing inside of his head.

_Would you still love me if you knew the truth?_

_Would you?_

_Could you?_

Danny turns his face into one of Steve’s hands, squeezing his eyes tightly shut as a fresh wave of tears streaks down his cheeks unchecked, and looks completely and utterly wrecked.

Steve isn’t aware his sense of hearing is back until he hears his name from behind him and it all rushes back to reality in a sharp _whoosh_.

“Steve.”

He ignores it, locks eyes with Danny again, and begs him to just tell him what to do. He _needs_ that look to be wiped off his face or he’s afraid he’ll shatter completely.

Danny looks right back at him, the agony in his eyes only growing stronger with every passing second, before he turns his face away and out of his Steve’s hands, shutting Steve out for the first time since getting him back.

Steve chokes on a sob.

When he looks back at Chin, he doesn’t even bother to hide the emotions from his face. Chin doesn’t flinch.

“We need to talk. There’s something you need to know.”

\--

Her presence had shocked him.

He’d been so caught up in Danny and the confusion of everything that was swirling before his eyes that he hadn’t noticed her come in with his team. And it wasn’t until after he had showered and stared at the mirror for an inordinate length of time in an attempt to bring some life back into his sullen and exhausted face – even though he’d just woken up after sleeping for eighteen hours. After considering it a lost cause, he’d left the bathroom and promptly halted in his path for the door when his eyes landed on her.

“Um,” he says eloquently.

He scans the room; his team is there and they’re watching him with these sort of braced, sympathetic expressions; but Danny’s not watching him, in fact, he’s not watching a single one of them, his eyes are glued to the outside world via his window. His face isn’t so pinched, and his tears have dried, but the air still feels thick with unsaid things and Danny’s legs are curled underneath him like he’s made himself as small as physically possible, and it _hurts_ to see that.

His line of sight gets caught on her arm that’s in a sling and the semi-healing cut along her right eye. She doesn’t smile at him, but there’s something about her eyes that immediately set him at ease despite never having met her before, she’s not holding the sympathetic expressions he’s so used to seeing in everyone around him. It’s more of an expression of understanding, like she knows what’s rolling through his mind because she…she…

“You were there, weren’t you?”

Steve asks suddenly, something making sense for the first time that day. “With Danny? The night we rescued him. You were one of the other missing persons?”

His team seems to be surprised by his deduction, but she just flat-out grins.

“Well, no wonder you have the hots for him, Danno. Tall, handsome, and sharp as a tack.” She gives Danny a sly look, completely unperturbed by his obvious lack of humor in the moment. “I totally approve.”

Her eyebrows dance, and Steve’s surprised to see a ghost of a smirk play along Danny’s lips when he turns to give her a look.

She rolls her eyes at him, and Steve’s heart lifts at the apparent comradery between them and how it seems to suck the darkness of the room back into its black hole, even just temporarily.

“I’m Tani, Tani Rey.” She reaches out to shake his hand, and he wordlessly complies. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Steve. We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“We?” Steve asks once he gets his tongue to unglue from the roof of his mouth and his vocal chords working again.

“Yeah, the others couldn’t be here. They wanted to, but since they’re still getting treated, they figured it’s best if I came alone.” She glances over at Danny, “Tommy says you still owe him that hundred bucks, and you know Abby is never gonna let it go, if you don’t follow through.”

Her voice goes quiet as if she’s sharing a secret between the two of them, but it echoes in the quiet of the hospital room and with her being so far away from his bed, the whispering as a whole is completely negated. “They kissed, by the way. Right before he went in for his elbow surgery. It was just as epic as we thought it’d be. They’re smitten, it’s disgusting.”

Danny actually up-and-snorts, and Steve is just really impressed with her tactics at making him come back from whatever place he’s wandered off to in his head. He’s beginning to think he needs to ask for lessons in Danny-wrangling himself.

“Which, I hear from a little birdie is not so far off the target with you and Tall, Dark, and Handsome over there.” She’s grinning like a mad woman now, but her eyes are back on Steve. “Man, am I glad that you two finally admitted the truth. I only endured the pining for three months, so I can only imagine what these” – she gestures in the team’s direction – “poor folks had to endure for years. You two really were blind as a bat, weren’t you?”

Steve’s ninety percent sure he can hear Kono stifle a giggle beside him, but he’s too busy trying to ignore the flush creeping up his neck to be certain.

Danny’s sigh is audible from across the room, and Steve honestly wants to know how he isn’t affected by her words at all. Maybe because he’s used to her by now, yeah, he’s going with that.

“Can we please stop terrorizing him and move on to why exactly you’re here? Or do we need to call in Nurse Reigns and watch you turn into a puddle of goo yourself?”

At her somewhat surprised and flushed look, he goes on.

“Oh, don’t think you’re getting off the hook that easily, you’re not the only one with little birdies around here.”

She raises her chin at Danny in a sign of defiance and he stays even with her, before she finally caves and laughs. “Why am I even surprised, I should’ve known.”

She looks back at Steve, the air grows a little thicker and Steve suddenly remembers everything that happened that morning in a rush. “It’d probably be best if they” – she jabs her thumb behind her at his team waiting patiently and supportively over in the sitting area – “explained everything while I talk to Danny for a bit.”

Steve glances over at Danny, and when their eyes meet and he can still see that familiar, lovable spark deep down, his heart hurts just a little less. Danny nods, and Steve didn’t even realize he was asking a question.

He’s by the bed in a split second, his hands tangling in his hair and his nose burying in the side of his neck, breathing him in and feeling his heart expand with the feeling of _home_ and _right_. Danny’s hands grip his shirt and curl into fists, tugging him closer and closer until there’s no more space between them, until they’re fused as one and their hearts are beating the same rhythm.

Steve’s whisper is right next to his ear, so he knows for sure that he’ll hear him because his next words have never felt so important than they do right now.

“I need you to know that no matter what happens, no matter what _happened_ , I will never love you any less than I do right now. And, I’d move planets and create constellations if you’d ask me to. I’m not an astrologist, but I’d do everything in my power, just so that I could make you happy. Because, Danno, I’ve never been more in love with you than I am in right in this moment. Nothing can possibly change that, _nothing_.”

He thinks he feels a wet warmth invade the cotton of his shirt, the curled fists at his stomach tremble just slightly, and there may even be a choked sort of sound at his chest where Danny’s head is smashed into.

He pulls Danny tighter to himself without even meaning to. “I love you, Danno. That’s it. Okay?”

Danny nods, the movement rather restricted from the closeness of their bodies, but Steve feels it nonetheless, and the tightness that had coiled inside of him releases just that tiny bit, just enough to help him breathe properly again.

Steve may be completely in the dark on whatever is happening, but this, _this_ makes sense. _They_ make sense. He takes comfort in that fact, because it’s what keeps him going in these days filled with shadows and cloudy forecasts and heartbreak.

\--

He’s focusing on the rush of the oxygen going in through his nose and out through his mouth.

Because he heard the words, but they don’t make sense. They don’t seem to belong in this reality, this universe of the world revolving around the sun. And no matter how many times he replays them over and over in his mind, they only grow more and more confusing and unable to be comprehended in his brain waves.

“Steve.” Chin’s voice is slightly muddled, like he’s farther away from him rather than actually being in the chair next to him, telling him things that want to shake up everything he knows about life. “Steve, did you hear me?”

He manages to make eye contact with him, but his vision is seeing double and it’s unfocused completely without his control, like his physiological system is suffering a blow with the information being thrown at him.

Maybe he heard wrong?

“What?” he croaks out eventually, knowing the answer already but being unable to stop himself from asking again.

Chin’s face crumples into one of empathy just before he says the same words that had rocked Steve to his core only a few seconds – minutes, hours? – prior.

“The reason we’ve been unable to find out anything about Danny’s captors is because we’ve had it all wrong. We’ve been looking in all the wrong places and assuming all the wrong things. The first one being that it’s not a man we’re looking for, it’s a woman, a pregnant woman.”

He pauses, before delivering the final blow that still has Steve recovering from hours later:

“And the baby, it’s... it's Danny’s.”

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, y'all. I'm back.
> 
> I'm so sorry for the really long wait in between chapter updates, but I needed to take a step back from writing because my health kind of took a turn and I needed time to myself. Things are calmer now, so hopefully I can be with y'all more regularly again.
> 
> A couple things:  
> 1\. TRIGGER WARNING -- the rape is addressed in this chapter, but I kept it very non-graphic and it's only talked about at the very end of the chapter.  
> 2\. I've changed my username, so if that confuses you, I'm sorry! It's still me :)  
> 3\. I've gone back and edited the timeline a bit because the dates weren't matching up, so just a note.  
> 4\. I hope this chapter answers a lot of y'all's questions.  
> 5\. I decided to upload an extra long chapter as a gift for y'all's patience, instead of splitting it up. I hope it was worth the wait!
> 
> And finally, thank y'all so very much for being so patient. I hope to be with y'all a lot more regularly from now on.
> 
> I love you all. Mahalo!

\--

“What’d she say to you?”

Tani watches as the words settle into Danny’s skin, the existence of them making the emotion floating in his bloodstream rise to the surface. She sees the way he struggles with their pursuit to soak through his pores, taking his heart with them, but she isn’t sorry for saying them because they both know this needs to happen. They both knew this day would come the first time that nightmare stepped into that basement from Hell and ravaged their lives one broken piece at a time. It doesn’t make the process any easier, though, watching him hang onto his dignity and the broken pieces of his soul by his fingertips.

He fidgets, his forehead resting in the heels of his hands. It’s a battle, him versus the memories. And she wants to fight it for him, take up the mantle and do justice for the souls in that dark room where they lived for a small eternity; because he did it for them, many times over, and he deserves a lifetime of reprieve, instead of a wasteland ravaged by guilt and self-incrimination and longing.

Tani glances over her shoulder and sees the man in question watching them like his life depends on it. And she knows it certainly may feel like that’s the case when his heart is currently curled up in a broken ball of limbs in a hospital bed, separated by a glass wall, and is fighting the inner turmoil of the last four months that’s tumbling in his veins.

She makes eye contact with Steve for a moment, so many emotions on display even from a distance of twenty feet, before his attention is diverted back to Chin and their tumultuous conversation. They’ve been having a lot of those recently, and sometimes she wants to punch something because of it. Yet it’s the process, and nobody said it was easy.

But maybe going slower might help.

She looks back at Danny before her eyes settle on his hands, and says the words without an ounce of doubt. “He’ll still love you the way he does now. Nothing’ll change.”

A softer version of a scoff escapes Danny, and she waits him out. Eventually, his eyes meet hers and he wilts a little, the bravado he was attempting to fake crumbling and revealing the agony she knew was really the heart of the matter.

“Talk to me,” she says, gently but firmly.

Danny’s eyes close, the wrinkles around his eyes making him look slightly wrecked, but she forges on because it needs to be aired, his words and emotions; but that doesn’t mean she can’t help him a little.

“Is it the doubt?” she poses, stretching out her legs and crossing them at the ankle. She figures giving him an easy question – because they both know it’s not that he doubts Steve’s love for him that’s the problem here, as evident by his rebuff – and giving off an air of patience might help him be able to voice the monster roaring inside his head.

A minute shake of the head is all she thinks she’s going to get when he stares down at the stitching in his bed sheet, his finger absentmindedly tracing over it, before he speaks in a whisper low enough that she has to time her breaths not to miss the whole thing.

“How can I be…worthy…of him?” It’s broken and small and in stark contrast to the man she had gotten to know in a room full of thorns and ugliness. She isn’t sure whether she wants to laugh or smack him at the absurdity, and he seems to sense it because he holds his hand up in a gesture that indicates he’s not done.

“He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known. And I’m... I’m. I’m _me_ –” He breaks off, emotion choking off his whisper, but she knows already. She was there, she saw.

She gives him a moment to gather his wits, a façade if there ever was one because she’s seen him at his worst, doing impossible things for them all, and had to help put him back together when he was just broken pieces of something that once that used to exist; but she knows it gives him some comfort, pretending that he’s whole and durable and unaffected, so she plays along for his sake.

Standing up, she carefully maneuvers her way over to the side of his bed and plops down in front of him. Her grip is soothing when she wraps her hand around one of his trembling ones -- something she knows to do because it didn’t take long for that knowledge to become known throughout their time together, how touch is a catalyst to soothe Danny’s inner demons. Her eyes hold a gentleness when his meet hers, something she knows they’ll forever need after months of unrelenting hardness and callous bristliness.

“I know it’s pointless to tell you what you already know – you did what you had to in order to survive. And I’m not gonna be one of those people who does anyway, because we both know that’s not what really happened.”

His eyes find their way back down to their interlocked hands, and she begins a thumb war with him just to take the pressure off of the conversation. The familiarity of it all reminding her of endless days and nights spent on a filthy concrete floor with nothing but their hands and words to pass the time.

“You look at your reflection in the mirror and think you see something that is shameful and dirty and unworthy of anything good.”

There’s a slight hitch in his breath, and as per usual, she already knows what he’s thinking.

“I know you, Danny. I know what you’re thinking and how it’s making you want to claw your own damn skin off. I was there,” and here’s where her own emotion will threaten to get the better of her. Because he saved them, time and time again, and she’ll never be able to express what that meant, what that _means_ to them all.

“I know what you did.” Her voice wavers and she puts it on display because he needs to know, he deserves to see what he did it all for, who he sold his innocence for. “Danny, when I look at you, I don’t see that. I see bravery and courage and light and love. When I look at you, I see a soul willing to endure it all so that _we didn’t have to._ Daniel Williams, you are not unworthy. You were willing to sell your soul to the devil himself if it meant that it spared the rest of us just a little bit less pain.”

His eyes are on her, and there are tears streaming down both of their cheeks.

“You deserve the world a hundred times over and more. You are the reason we are here. Danny, I look at you and I see the reason I’m still here, the reason we’re still here, _alive._ ”

He breaks down after that, his sobs wracking his body in hard and merciless waves, and scraping every last nerve ending into its wake. She breathes a sigh of relief, amongst her own salty droplets, because she’s seen this kind of crying in him before. Rare and mostly hidden from the others – because they’re softer than the two of them are, their souls more delicate to the evils of this world. He’d weep in such a way that it took every ounce of strength from the tips of his toes to the tops of his ears, ridding himself of all the emotion building up in strength and size inside of him, unyielding and remorseless and calculating for just the right moment to pounce and decimate everything in its path. It became a sort of rejuvenation and rebuilding for him, something that his soul had become to need periodically in a reality that was unfortunately vile and malicious and joyless. It's like the moon crawling back to it’s home in the near-dawn: you’ll miss its comfort, its ability to protect you from the openness of the light, but you know it’s gonna be okay because the light always brings a new day filled with promises and hopes and dreams and endless potential.

What feels like half a century later, he pulls back, and she wipes at his tender cheeks, the actions having become second nature to her after having spent so long within each other’s emotional mayhem.

When he’s wiping his nose with a wad of tissues, his tears having made his face pink and swollen, and he’s mostly calmed and in the clear from the tsunami of their reality, she speaks again, her words imploring him to believe their sincerity.

“Don’t let what she did to you make you think any less than what you deserve. She isn’t worth it. You are so much more than dirty, you are _everything._ Don’t let her evil take that away from you.”

Danny’s eyes find hers again but this time they’re clear, his lips even turning up just slightly at the edges in a soft smile.

“Besides, you think he’s never felt dirty and unworthy of happiness from being a SEAL? He’s had to make choices, hard, unforgiving choices, just like you. If there’s anyone else in the world that would understand that,” she nods in Steve’s direction, “it’s him.”

Danny’s eyes follow her line of thinking and land on Steve, who’s watching them with enough emotion in his eyes to fill a landfill. And when his eyes find Danny’s, he smiles tentatively, only becoming more confident when Danny returns the gesture with one of his own.

She waits, giving them a moment before bringing the gloomier parts of reality back in. She wishes she didn’t have to in the first place, no two people more deserving of endless joy than these two men, but the sooner they get through the ugly bits, the sooner they can all live a realistic happily ever after.

“Danny,” she says softly.

His eyes don’t leave Steve’s, but some of the tension has returned to his shoulders so she knows he’s on the same wavelength as her. Sometimes it amazes her how in-tune they’ve become in such short of time, but she supposes the environment they were in, it’s inevitable really.

She grasps his hand in hers, rubbing comforting circles into the spaces between his knuckles and tendons. “Tell me what happened that night.”

Danny sighs.

\--

**Three days before**

“Three months out of practice and you’re still better than me,” cheeks Kono, as she draws another card from the stack on Danny’s bedsheet.

Danny smirks at her.

Thirty seconds later, Danny slaps his cards down and pumps his fist in victory. Kono throws her cards up in the air in defeat, a dramatic sigh and the sound of flying of cards stifled by Danny’s muted giggling.

Kono’s phone buzzes which she answers with a fond glare at Danny. “Perfect timing, Chin. Why couldn’t you have called five seconds ago _before _I got my butt whipped, hmm?”__

____

Danny struggles to get his laughter under control, tears prickling his eyes from the effort, but the tinny chuckle from Chin over the phone is loud enough for him to hear.

____

Kono rolls her eyes. “Yeah, uh-huh, whatever. Next game is mine, _brah._ ” She says, eyeing Danny with a soft, pointed look before stepping out of the room to listen to Chin.

____

Danny’s just finishing gathering the cards and shuffling them into one stack when the door clicks open.

____

“You ready for another gam--?” Danny’s whisper cuts off when he realizes it wasn’t Kono that he was talking to.

____

“Hello, Danny.”

____

Danny’s eyes dart towards the door reflexively, straining to hear Kono or any of the nurses outside the door, and he angles his body to hide the hand he’s slowly itching towards the nurse’s call button.

____

“Melissa.” He eyes the gun in her hand, stomach coiling at the possibility that she might have used it to get into his room. “What are you doing here?”

____

“Thought I’d come see you.” She walks to the window, glancing down at the street too calmly for anyone sane enough to know the place was about to be swarmed with every law enforcement agent within twenty miles. “I missed you.”

____

Danny swallows down the bile attempting to leave his throat, and swiftly presses the nurse’s call button before she turns back around to watch him.

____

“Didn’t you miss me?” she asks, and the hopefulness in her voice only makes his blood boil just a little bit more.

____

He’s torn between being honest and playing along, but she saves him from having to answer by striding across the room to stick her head into the bathroom to look around. “You don’t have to answer. I know things have gotten…complicated…recently. And feelings are such fickle things when things get complicated.”

____

She’s back to standing in front of him again, but a movement outside the window leading to the hallway catches his eye: it’s Kono. She’s armed and seconds away from making her entry into the room, and he’s reminded once again of the devotion of his team.

____

“What do you want?” asks Danny, stalling for time.

____

Melissa gives him a look. “Don’t be silly, you know exactly why I came here.”

____

At that, Danny’s blood runs cold and his vision begins to tilt just a little, which is why he’s mostly out of it for the next few moments, caught in a mind-numbing haze. When he comes back to the present, the three Five-O members have infiltrated his room, and Melissa’s got her gun pressed firmly into his temple. An angry-eyed Chin, black-eyed Kono – Danny winces at the sight of an ugly bruise forming around her eye –, and out-of-breath Lou all have their guns pointed in their direction, and Danny has to blink several times to come back to the present, despite the storm brewing inside of his veins.

____

“Let him go,” commands Chin.

____

“Tsk tsk,” she says in disapproval, her arm tightening around Danny’s chest where she’s holding him up close to her chest. He’d shiver in disgust if he knew it wouldn’t provoke her in any way. “Danny, why don’t you tell them what they need to do?”

____

Danny closes his eyes briefly, swallowing against the self-hatred he feels curling inside of his chest. Opening his eyes again, he pins his eyes on the three of them. “Put your guns down.”

____

Chin doesn’t flinch, but Kono’s expression falters a little and Lou scoffs at the mere mention of the idea.

____

“And why would we do that?” asks Lou, his disbelief ringing loud and clear, but Danny knows it’s not really directed at him, he’s just the unfortunate messenger right now.

____

She squeezes his arm and he forces himself not to squirm away from her touch, knowing it would only worsen the situation. “Go on, Danny,” she says, her tone filled with such ice-cold patronization he’s surprised there’s any warmth left in the room.

____

Danny watches his teammates, his friends, his _o’hana_ with eyes so full of emotion, his heart wrecking itself from the inside because he knows from this moment forward, there’s no going back. There’s no longer pretending there’s this curtain separating these past few months from now. That hollowness he’s grown so used to feeling, like pieces of his soul have been carved out and gaping holes have been left in their wake, settles underneath his skin when Steve’s warm eyes flash across his own. A sob wants to tear from his throat at the mere notion that Steve might think less of him for this, for any of this; but he stamps it down, crushes it with his foot, stomps on it as hard as he can mentally will himself to, and shoves it back down his throat because she does _not_ deserve that. He’ll duct tape himself together until she’s gone if he has to, but she won’t see him lose it, she doesn’t deserve another drop of emotion for the rest of her days.

____

Eyes open, he forces his mouth to cooperate even if it feels like a malfunctioning puppeteer and his puppet. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the looks on Chin, Lou, and Kono’s faces for as long as he lives, though; his next words burrowing sinkholes through their exterior.

____

“Because…she’s pregnant, and the baby, it-it’s mine.”

____

\--

____

**Present**

____

_“The reason we’ve been unable to find out anything about Danny’s captors is because we’ve had it all wrong. We’ve been looking in all the wrong places and assuming all the wrong things. The first one being that it’s not a man we’re looking for, it’s a woman, a pregnant woman. And the baby, it’s Danny’s.”_

____

The words echo loudly as Steve watches the way his fingers tremble, images and feelings and so many grief-filled questions coating the surface of his skin like a crushing blanket. He doesn’t have enough energy these days to fight their pursuit to overthrow the very being of his existence, his heart and mind so worn down and depleted. He waits as the oppression clouds his throat and fills his veins, memories of the worst months of his life playing like a motion picture behind his eyelids. The ache sets into his bones, and he succumbs to the pull with a barely restrained grunt, hardly any strength left inside of him.

____

\--

____

_Danny’s giggle fills Steve’s ears and seems to saturate the office, the floor, the building with life – and up until now, Steve didn’t even know that life had a sound. He can feel the smile on his lips reaching the limits of his facial muscles as he watches the way Danny’s giggle seems to light him up from the inside and spill out onto those around him like sunbeams._

____

_He watches how Danny’s infectious giggles seem to spread around the room, Kono practically in stitches on the floor and Chin’s quiet chuckle gaining volume the longer it goes on, as Lou reenacts a story in dramatic effect. The office seems to shine brighter for Steve with every inch that Danny’s grin stretches, and Steve feels its pull stronger than the Earth’s gravity._

____

\--

____

“Steve.”

____

Steve starts from his daze, reality rushing back in with the force of a groundswell. The cramping of his hands, having been balled up in fists, is making itself known as his startled eyes land on the empathetic ones in Tani.

____

“You okay?” she asks, watching him with an expression that he knows means she knows exactly what’s going on inside of his thoughts.

____

He consciously uncurls his straining fingers, clearing his throat of as much emotion as he possibly can, and struggles with what to say.

____

She sighs, coming to sit down in the cushioned chair beside him – which he’s just now noticed is vacant, as is the rest of them where his team had just been sitting and upending his world with earth-shattering words. “You don’t have to answer that, we both know what your answer would be anyway.”

____

He nods, relieved, and changes to a safer topic. “Where’d everybody go? Or…when did everybody...leave exactly?”

____

She nods her head towards Danny’s room, and he catches sight of his team surrounding Danny’s bed like a gentle flock. “A few minutes ago, I asked them to give us a moment to talk.”

____

It’s quiet for a moment, Steve’s thoughts and heart in a jumbled mess from everything that he’s just been told and Tani watches the way Kono, Chin, and Lou interact with Danny through the window.

____

“There’s something you need to know, about what happened.” Tani’s voice is quiet but firm when she finally speaks up, and Steve feels the goosebumps rise on his skin almost immediately at her choice of words.

____

“He’d rather you not know at all. I think he actually would have taken it to the grave had I not found out when I did,” Tani’s eyes drop to the floor, and Steve can see the way the memories roll around in her head as she absently watches her fingers twist and turn. “But I think it’s important for you to know, just you, because it kind of…changed…everything. And you deserve to know.”

____

Steve’s eyebrows furrow slightly, his need to know warring with his self-preservation arising after so much heaviness being thrown at him. He swallows his impulse to run away, run far _far_ away, and he leans forward on his knees, bracing his heart for whatever he’s about to hear.

____

“Tell me.”

____

Tani takes a few deep breaths, obviously readying herself to say the words just as much as Steve was readying himself to hear them. Her hands toy with each other, before she looks up at him, eyes filled to the brim with tears, the emotion in them sparkling so profoundly that it leaves Steve breathless.

____

“There’s a reason...Danny…was the only one who she…raped.” Her voice wobbles and the emotion scraping her voice leaves it hoarse and rough.

____

Steve hangs his head, the words she’s saying already taking form in his mind and weighing his heart down like an anchor travelling down to the bottom of the ocean.

____

“I didn’t see it at first, he’d hide it well. But then one day, after helping him get cleaned up, I saw the b-blood –” her voice cracks, and a few tears slip down her cheeks. “It was…lower than usual. He’d tried to play it off, but I could see the agony in his eyes…”

____

She swipes at her cheek, her voice taking an even quieter tone than before. “He’d overheard her talking to one of her people about – who she wanted to…do it…with, and the next time she came for him, he’d made a d-deal with her: he’d do it any time…she…wanted, without a fight, if-if-if she’d leave the rest of us a-alone –”

____

She breaks off unable to finish due to the sobs wracking through her, and Steve gathers her in his arms, his own sobs tearing through his throat like a vicious monster.

____

“He s-sacrificed himself, _for us_. He s-s-saved _us._ ”

____

And that’s the moment Steve’s perception of Daniel Williams changed entirely.

____

\--

____

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first McDanno fanfiction. Please let me know what you think! All comments or kudos are welcome!
> 
> I'll update when I can :) Thanks for reading!


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